Animation - Fusion 360 Tutorial

- [Instructor] The animation capabilities of Fusion 360 are focused on creating assembly instructions and exploded views for creating 2D documentation. To begin creating an animation, we'll change the workspace to Animation. This will change the tool bar and add a timeline to our assembly. The timeline is for capturing motion and changes in camera view. To begin creating our animation though, I'm going to turn the View Capture off. This will give me more flexibility for repositioning the model to sort out the transformations that I'd like without capturing multiple camera occurrences. We'll take a closer look at creating camera view changes in just a moment. There are multiple transformation types, including the ability to Auto Explode. To try this, you can select all of your components, and choose the Auto Explode: All Levels tool. If you have components that are all stacked on one another, such as a bolted assembly or a shaft assembly, Auto Explode might work very well for you. For many people though, it does not give the exact results sought. If Auto Explode does work for you, you can use the sliding scale to make quick updates. I'm going to cancel this and do a manual transformation. I'll start the Transform Components tool, select the pin in hinge. It will give me the ability to move that along a plane around an axis or along an axis. So I'll slide the pin out a distance. In the dialog, I even have the option of turning on the trail line. When I click OK it will add this transformation to the timeline. So beginning at zero and going until one second, this pin will move out. If I play this you'll see it happens immediately. If I click and drag when this happens, start the timeline over, you'll see there's a delay and then the pin will come out. Let's go ahead and make some additional transformations. We can set the playhead when we want the transformation to begin happening. We'll select the Transform tool. This time I'll use it for the marking menu. And I'm going to select both the washer and the screw. Going to move up a distance. Turn on the trail. Right-click and start the tool again. This will create the event for both objects in the timeline. I'll hold Command and deselect the washer, and move the screw up again for a second event to move just above the washer. When I click OK or start the Transform tool again. I'll click OK. And now it makes that entire move for the screw in one action. I'll set a new timeline marker. Move the top. You'll see the orientation of the top isn't quite what I would like, so either in the full dialog I can set pivot, or on the mini dialog I can set pivot. Pick the geometry that will give me the orientation that I want. Be sure to click the Done checkmark. And then make your modification. Start the Transform tool again. Click anywhere on the screen to clear my selection. And then pick the last pin for its transformation with a trail. Now, if I rewind the timeline and click Play, I'll see there's a delay then it all starts to happen. Maybe we'd like a little bit more time. And maybe we'd like the washer to start coming out a little bit after the bolt starts to move. And maybe the movement of the bolt can be a little longer. So clicking the end of the event and sliding it out. We can have the top begin to move before the bolt and the washer are all the way out, stretching it out. And we can have the pin move just after or just before the top begins to move. Let's see how that looks. That looks just fine. Now let's start taking a look at how we want to share this and how we want people to view this. I'll turn on View Capture again. And it will restore the previous point of view we had when we started this process. That's not the point of view I want to begin my animation with, so I'm going to grab the playhead and move it all the way to the scratch zone all the way on the left. You'll see there's a curtain icon. So we're kind of going behind the scenes and starting this out maybe with this point of view. We'll establish our point of view. Now let's move the timeline. We'll see how things look from this point of view. Looks good. Then when the screw and the washer begin to move, maybe we'd like to be able to see that a little more clearly. So at that point in time I'm going to orbit the model around. It creates a new camera event. Now, if you don't move the timeline you can adjust that camera event to establish what it will end up being. So if I rewind now, hit Play, slides out, and now components begin to go out of view. So before the end of the animation we'll move the playhead to back before the end of the animation, zoom out until we capture the entire view. We'll rewind, play. Now, that transition to the end should begin happening a little earlier. So we'll have it have a slight pause between those actions. And now we're able to capture the full motion with all the components remaining on the screen. All of this was done as part of storyboard one. So storyboard one is essentially capturing the disassembly of our product. An option that we have is to create another storyboard. Start it either as a clean storyboard where we would begin just as we did with this storyboard. Or we can have it start from the end of the previous. If I click OK I've got storyboard two I can rename Assembly. And now it is active. Storyboard two is starting out from our assembly. I'll set my playhead to a half-second. Select all of my components. I could select them individually in the browser. Then I'll go to Transform, and select Restore Home. Rewinding and playing, in half a second you see that it will bring in all the components back to their original position. With Restore Home we can spread these events out and create assembly instructions. The other thing we can do with Restore Home is let's begin by moving the fasteners out in time. Stretching things around. Just to do something quick. We'll see how that looks. Now let's take and make another modification. I'll move the playhead back to the beginning and select the Purchase components. And under Transform, select Show/Hide. Now at the beginning of this animation, those components will be off. Now setting the timer at 4.6 seconds just before those components began to move. We can select them again and switch Show/Hide. If we play this we'll see that they instantaneously appear. Instead, we'll select the Show/Hide event and stretch it out so that these components fade in over time. Going back to the beginning. We'll hit Play. They fade in and move. Now that we have the motion, we can return back up and begin the process of focusing on capturing our views. Updating using the scratch pad. I'll check my animation. That looks okay. Now let's publish that to a video file. We'll publish the current storyboard. We can select a specific resolution. Click OK and generate a file. Either or both on the cloud or on our computer.