Explore the mechanics of the animator tool within Navisworks, with a focus on animating a camera. The article takes you through the process of creating key frames, adjusting camera positions, and modifying animation speed to achieve your desired scene.
Key Insights
- The animator tool in Navisworks can be used to animate a camera, providing a dynamic perspective in your project. This process involves finding a starting position for the camera, creating viewpoints, and starting a scene.
- Creating key frames is crucial for capturing moments in time and shaping the camera's path of motion. Adjusting the placement of these key frames on the timeline allows you to change the speed and flow of the camera's movement.
- Navisworks allows for high precision in camera animations, enabling changes to be made accurately. Users can visually see the key frames and easily adjust them by clicking and moving. It's also possible to edit the times for even more precision in animations.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video we'll be covering the Animator tool, and we'll be looking at how to animate a camera within the Animator tool. So without the object animations turned on, our goal is to have something that looks like this.
We'll be crashing through the doors this time and we will just be concentrating on how this camera performs in our project. We'll be starting with the Lesson 2 BIM 361 complete file. If you don't have your Animator tool on already, make sure you go to the Animator tab and in the Create panel, select Animator and then just dock it to the bottom of your screen so that it's filling up the entire window of your Navisworks program.
Now Animator should be blank like mine looks, and the first thing we need to do is find a starting position for our camera. It's going to be really easy to do this if we create a couple of viewpoints to start with. So the best place to start for this is going to be, actually the only place that we're going to need to start for this project, is to face the building directly and make sure that we're not too tall as we approach the building directly.
So right about this height, get there and then back straight up. Okay and then we want to save this viewpoint. We'll call this one approach one.
I like to create a viewpoint. It's not entirely necessary, but I like to create one because oftentimes I want to do some object animations at the same time and it's nice to have a place to always know that you can return to. So once that's set we can start our scene.
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So in Animator we need to have a container for all of our objects and cameras, and that's the green button on the bottom left of your Animator panel. So let's hit Add Scene and we will be adding a scene. We can call this one approach and currently we don't have anything within this scene.
It's just called approach. That's about all we have. In order to animate the camera, we need to attach a camera to something within the scene, and the way that we would do that is to right-click and then go to Add Camera, Blank Camera.
We can keep this as camera because we can only have one camera in each scene, so it goes without saying that it's a camera. Now I'm just going to describe how we're going to do this. First, we're going to mark this position and then we'll be moving inside, and you don't have to follow along with this right now.
I'm just demonstrating, and then we're going to mark a place where the camera goes all the way to the back of the building, and we'll also be marking a position where the camera sort of tracks to the left and looks back at that door. So the first thing we need to do to capture these moments in time, they're called keyframes in Animator, is to select the camera, and then we'll see our scrubber appear. It's not a black diamond, but a black triangle on top with a line, and first capture the initial keyframe.
You can see that that little keyframe shows up, and next we can move the scrubber along. Let's move it to around four seconds. You don't have to be entirely accurate.
We can always change it in the future, and next thing we want to do is go through the door and then find some spot to make another keyframe. Now if I scrub back and forth I'll see that Navisworks is doing the math filling in everything between our keyframes. Next, we want to find a place that is back here, and I'll be turning around at the same time and let's find a spot that's right back here.
I believe I've actually just demonstrated what you're not supposed to do, and I'm glad I did that because you'll be doing this a lot, as I tend to do with Animator. You always want to move the scrubber first because I'll show you why. As soon as I grab the scrubber and start to move it goes back to that old position.
If you move the scrubber first, then you can move your camera to the position that you want. I guess that's one of those lessons by demonstration. Then let's cut through the keyframe here and we'll try it out by scrubbing back, and we see that, oh you know what, this is not actually looking in the right direction. I wanted it to look in that direction as we're panning or tracking to the left and rotating, and the reason it's doing it the opposite way is because Navisworks is finding the closest two points between looking this direction, looking that direction, and looking back in this direction, and so it's picking this other way to look. If we want to actually change that, we have to do something manual, which is pretty easy.
So what I'm doing is I'm dragging the scrubber back to between these keyframes and I'm going to turn around exactly 90 degrees because I want it to look in this direction at this time and then capture that keyframe. Now Navisworks has no choice but to look to the right as it's rotating and then it completes its 180. So finding a few little tricks to sort of fool Navisworks is beneficial sometimes.
And now the next step is to see if our animation is exactly what we're looking for. So I'm going to rewind all the way back to the beginning and hit the play button and I crash through the door and now it starts to rotate. Rotating a little bit too fast for my taste, so I think I'm going to extend that rotation and that is a pretty easy thing to do with Animator.
If you want to make something take longer, then what you'll do is you'll extend the keyframes by just clicking and moving one of the keyframes over in time, and I'm going to move this one back to halfway so that it doesn't suddenly speed up when it hits that keyframe. Let's just check it out first. So I go through the building and then I start to turn and that's a little bit better.
I know that I'm not going to make my audience sick by rotating too fast like the first time and that's still not exactly what I want. I'd like this area to take a little bit longer. So let's stretch it out a little bit more.
I'm going to move all three of these guys forward two seconds. There we go. Rewind and play.
I think that's about the pace I'm looking for. So I guess the lesson here is that Animator can allow you to use much more precision than the viewpoint animations, and because you can visually see the keyframes, you can easily just adjust them by clicking and moving, or if you want to actually change the times more accurately you can right-click, go to Edit, and then you have these more accurate keyframes. Like if I wanted this to be 12 seconds exactly, I can sure do that.
But that's all there is to the camera animations. I'd like you to save this file as… we're going to save this in the Lesson 3 folder and this will be BIM361Complete.nwf but it'll just be located in Lesson 3. And hit save. And then we're going to look at object animations in the next video.