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ne of the little-known modules in Autodesk® Navisworks is Animator, that friendly tool that allows you to create a scene with model objects. The scenes in Animator can be complex or simple. For instance, a scene can be as simple as having a crane rotate or as complex as having cars moving in a parking lot with a camera following an avatar into a revolving door. Regardless of the complexity, Animator is there to help you design a scene that brings your imagination to life.
INTERPOLATION IS YOUR FRIEND The Animator module works by using keyframes. Keyframes capture the animation set—a group of objects in the animation scene—at a given point and interpolate the steps necessary to connect to the following keyframe. For instance, if a car moves from point A, the first keyframe, to point B, the second keyframe, Animator will fill in all the missing frames to connect points.
Figure 1: Interpolation
January 2012
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Navisworks Manage
by: Michael Smith 2012
To make an animation scene, open Animator from the Home tab of the ribbon and click the Animator icon. In the Animator window, right-click in the left pane and select add animation scene. Then in the selection tree or the model scene, select the model components you wish to animate. Right-click the animation scene and select add animation set. You can add many animation sets to one animation. For instance, you might add multiple cars to the same scene to animate a cross street or to demonstrate the ingress/ egress of a parking lot.
ANIMATOR TOOLS The Animator module has many different tools. The first group of tools includes translate, rotate, and scale. These Animator tools act exactly as the item tools do, but they do not affect the model objects; they affect the animation set objects’ keyframe settings. Put plainly, the animation tools will only help change the settings for an Animator keyframe, whereas item tools change the settings in the model scene. A good practice is to never open the Item Tools tab in Navisworks while working with Animator because you might use the item tool instead of the Animator tool. To create a simple animation such as a car moving down the street, select the car animation set in an animation scene, and create a keyframe by clicking the keyframe animation tool. Drag the time slider on the timeline to the point in time where you want the car to be located next. Click the translate Animator tool and move the car to the desired location, and capture the new keyframe. Click the play button on the Animator window to watch the car move from point A to point B in time. The rotate Animator tool is a little more tricky than the translate tool. In order to harness the true power of this tool it is paramount that you understand the location of the pivot point of the object you wish to rotate. Going back to the car example, you would need to set a point on the car between the front two tires in order to
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