Setting up an animation - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Voiceover] The first thing that we need to do when we're getting ready to do an animation, is to go up and turn on the timeline. I can easily do that by clicking on view, come down here to show timeline, or just hit control L, and the timeline should pop up at the bottom of your screen. Now we're ready to start adding key frames, and start building our animation. But before we do that, I want to show you the basic buttons and workflow that we're going to be using to set up an animation, so over here on the far left hand side, you can see here it just says minimize or restore timeline, so make it smaller or bigger. It's going to tell us where we are in the time code. Go back to the start, we have rewind, play backwards, play forwards, fast forward and go to the end. Over here is show/hide the advanced settings. Next one's going to be decrease the play speed, so I can speed things up or slow them down. And over here is the little bunny meaning you can go faster, the turtle of course means go slower, and right now, we're playing at one times speed. The next one here is auto key framing, you can turn that on or off. Generally, I recommend turning that off, so we can add our own key frames in. The next one here is going to be the auto fit to last frame. A couple buttons here, we can loop the playback and then toggle timeline workspace. Now in your animation, you're going to have multiple frames per second, so 30 frames per second, so if you have 30 frames, you have to render out each one of those frames, so if it takes you five minutes to render each frame, times 30, that's how long it's going to take you to render one second of video, so that can add up really quickly, so make sure you don't over increase that number to something like 120 frames per second, unless you really need it, I'd recommend something in the realm of 24, 25 or 30 frames per second. Which is typical of most video you're going to see out there. So let's keep it at 30 frames per second. And now, let's get ready to do some animation. So the very first thing we want to look at is adding a key frame, so we have to pick something in our model that we want to start and end. Now that can be the moving of a camera, that can be moving of a light, that can be moving of an object in our key frame, or even changing something like a camera's focal point to do a rack focus, for instance, we're going to focus on the front of the watch, here, and then we're going to rack focus it all the way back to the back, so you can kind of sweeping over the product itself. So you have a whole bunch of options, and they're all going to be set up, pretty much exactly the same way. So the first thing I want to do is choose something. So over here, you can see I have this camera right here, and I might want to move that camera around. So before I do that, I'm going to right click on that camera, and say add key frame. So go ahead and click on that, and notice it adds it down here to the bottom of the timeline. So I have that very first key frame right there. Now I can grab this little red arrow here, and pull that to the end, and that's how long my video is going to be. The next thing I want to do is drag out this play head, and put it anywhere I want to where I want that video to, or that motion to stop. So at this point in time here, I might say I would like to make a few adjustments to that camera. So let's go ahead and change the latitude of that shot, so I can change it to something like that. So right at that point, notice it automatically adds that key frame for me, right there, as I make that move, so now if I play that animation from the beginning, nothing's happening over here because it's at the end, but in the section here, notice it's doing that animation between those two key frames. Over here, there's nothing, so it's not doing everything. Now if you wanted to adjust that animation, you would click on that key frame and drag it out a little further, and make that go all the way to the end. Now if I click on play again, notice it does that animation through that entire motion. And then of course, because I have loop turned on, it's going to go back and keep doing that over and over and over again. So that's all it really takes to do an animation. We can easily just add a key frame, do some type of a motion, like a change in latitude or longitude, you can change the camera's focal point. You can add a light, move a light, you can do all types of different things, and move parts in your assembly, just by clicking on them, adding a key frame, then moving it to the location you want, and then adding another key frame. And we can building on our animation, one step at a time, in that same manner. Those are the basics for starting with key frames and adding an animation, we're going to be getting into the fine details a little bit more in the next few movies, but that's the basics for getting started with running an animation inside of Solidworks Visualize.