From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Composer

Introduction to animation mode - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Composer

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Introduction to animation mode

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- [Instructor] So far, we've only been looking at generating still images and views, but SOLIDWORKS Composer can also generate great animation videos. Now when working with animations, the first thing we'll probably want to do is turn on our timeline, so I'll just jump to the window tab, and under my show hide I have an option called timeline. Probably want to check that off, and as soon as I do I should have my timeline popping up on the bottom of my screen. Again, I can customize my user interface, push that over to the top or the right of my screen, or wherever I'd like, but generally I'd prefer to have it on the bottom here. What I also might notice here is that the timeline appears to be grayed out, and that's because right now we're in view mode, and we need to jump over to animation mode. So I have this button in the top left of my screen, and this button will just switch me back and forth between animation mode and view mode. So I can click once to switch to animation mode, and now notice the timeline is no longer grayed out, and I also have a new ribbon tab that's just popped up called animate, which has a number of additional animation tools. Again, if I need to switch back to my view mode, I just click that same button to jump back and forth between the two. So within my timeline I have a number of important tools. I have a bunch of playback buttons to play, pause, stop, jump to next, and so forth. So I'll just play through my simple animation here, and here we can really use all of the Composer tools we've learned thus far to generate whatever animations we'd like. In this case I just have a simple explode animation. I have some camera angles moving, parts disappearing, or becoming transparent, and then I'm just zooming into some of the internals here, and also having some collaborative actors pop up, such as a few labels, just in this case. So before we get started, we'll just run through some new animation terminology. So one important aspect of my animations, within my timeline here, I have this blue bar, and this is what I call the time bar, or the playback bar, and of course as I play through my animations, this is just showing the current point in time. And what's nice about this, is I can actually click and drag this bar as well to jump into specific points of time. So if I need to make edits at exactly 16 seconds, I can jump to 16 seconds, or move back and forth to jump forward or backward within time. Another important term within my animation is what I call keys. And a key controls any characteristic, any actor, at a specific point in time. Hence, it represents my characteristic changes throughout my animation. So, again, we can see throughout our timeline here, each of these icons are what I'd call a key, and I have a number of different types of keys that I can change. So a location key would signify any change in location. Property key would be a change in property, such as opacity or transparency, and my camera keys would be occurring whenever my camera angle is changing. So for example, from zero to about three seconds here, you can see my camera key is changing, so I'm changing from an isometric view to a front view here. Then from about three to five seconds, you see a location key changing from three to five, and if I just scroll through here, this is representing the legs of my drone exploding downward.

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