Fusion 360 Ultimate Animation and Joints

[Lexikitty]

Hi there, 

  Just updated to F360 Ultimate, super excited to play with all the new toys. I cobbled something together yesterday so that it'd be ready to animate today - however, I seem to be doing something wrong during the animation process. I can transform parts just fine, but they aren't constrained by the joints that bind them. If I go back to the Model workspace, everything works fine. And Motion Study won't stay open when I switch to the Animation view.  Below are two shots of how the transition should look - the arm bracket gradually opens via the slotted beam in the center. 

Unrelated, is there a way to render steps in an animation out to individual frames/a movie file? Just curious. The Animation feature looks really nifty, though, and I can't wait to play with it more (and the CAM workspace, too)!

Cheers, 

~LK

[Jon.Dean]

Glad to see you are excited by all the new features.

I am currently looking into your problem and will reply shortly.

Jon.

[TimeraAutodesk · Accepted solution]

@Lexikitty Thanks so much for your feedback, and for trying out the new Animation workspace. Assemblies in the Animation workspace are purposefully not constrained. This allows users to create exploded views, assembly or disassembly instructions, etc. with freedom. We will be working to allow joints, constraints and motion studies all to be used in the Animation workspace in the future for those who want to keep those constraints for certain animated sequences, so keep your eyes open in a future update. 

Also, we currently only support playback of the animation in the interactive A360 Web Viewer (from your item details page in your hub). We are currently working on a publish to mp4 feature that will allow you to publish movies locally and we hope to have that out in a release in early 2015. 

Best,

Timera

[Lexikitty]

Aw, sad. The exploded views are nice though, and work quite well. Thanks for the super-fast response, and I can't wait for the updates in 2015 to allow this! It would even be helpful to just allow Mition Study to run in all applicable workspaces (Model, Animation, and Render); then you could render out 5 or so frames to show the general movement of things like multi-axis joints. 

Thanks again, and keep up the awesome work, 

~LK

[TimeraAutodesk]

Hi LK,

I'd love to follow up with you in regards to your use / wish-list of the animations feature of Fusion 360. Would you be available for a quick chat sometime next week? Shoot me an email if so - timera.hart@autodesk.com

Best,

Timera

[Lexikitty]

I've just sent you a message at that address. Thanks so much!

~LK

[lukepighetti]

Hi there, I went to do my first animation today and couldn't figure out how to animate a joint. Has this feature been added yet?

[prabakarm]

Luke, we don't support animation of joints yet as Timera pointed out earlier in this thread.  What are you trying to animate?

BTW, if this is your first time to the animation workspace I would suggest checking out the help topic on this to get some of the basics.  The video does not reflect some of the UI changes on the animation timeline made in the Jan update but the concepts are the same.

[lukepighetti]

Hi, Timera's post I believe was three months ago. Didn't know if anything changed in recent updates. 🙂

So Animation is only for exploded views?

I'm trying to animate moving joints with limits to show the functionality of a product. I guess I just assumed that's what Animate workspace was for. I guess I'll just stick to Screencast for now.

[TimeraAutodesk]

Hi Luke,

The Animation workspace is for exploded views as well as any other manual animated sequence. The caveat with joints is that we are still working on supporting *existing* joints applied to a model in the Model workspace. The Animations workspace gives all the tools to manually animate just about any sequence you want (whether it be assembly, disassembly, animation of internal workings of a component, etc.). 

The help site has some helpful videos, as Prabakar mentioned, and we just finished adding an Animation module to the Fusion 360 Onboarding content that you might find helpful. You can download the PDF and datasets here if you wish to run through it. 

Also, here's a cool example of an animation that a student created of their Fusion 360 dataset just recently. If you open the interactive view of the model in the gallery, you can play-back the short animation. Hopefully this gives you an idea of the things that are possible today. 

To answer your question about what has been added, in the latest release, we added in the ability to publish out videos locally - which was the top customer request right after we launched the Animations workspace. We also added in some other usability enhancements, such as gestura support, etc. to improve the experience. Again, we are continuing to work on adding additional functionality to the workspace, and the team is currently focusing on the support of joints from the modeling workspace. 

Thanks for the feedback, and please let us know if there are any other suggestions you have as you dive deeper into the Animations workspace of Fusion 360.

Best,
Timera

[lukepighetti]

I could probably approximate some simple joints if I can move the triad to a circle centerpoint (face of a pin, hole etc). Is this possible? I can't seem to move the triad without transforming the component.

[lukepighetti]

Is there any way to animate a four bar linkage like this box shown?

https://screencast.autodesk.com/main/details/a51cd234-a216-4bde-8c0f-7ecccd8f2629

[TimeraAutodesk]

Hi Luke,

Yes, the triad can be moved (without transforming a component). With the Transform Components command active, click the re-orient button in the mini toolbar, then choose a new location for the triad, click the green checkmark and then move forward with the transformation of the component. 

   

If you want to share the box design with me, I can duplicate that animation manually so you can see an example. Note that we are currently working on joint support in Animations so this will be a much smoother workflow in the future.

Thanks,

Timera

(timera.hart@autodesk.com)

[lukepighetti]

Hi Timera,

Can this be animated?

Thanks

Luke

https://screencast.autodesk.com/main/details/dbbb0c61-49f0-4390-8514-b26267cf7109

[yoshimitsuspeed]

How is it possible that every time I try to do anything in F360 it's not supported?
I just spent a ton of time trying to get joints to do what I needed so I could use them in animations. I just assumed that this would be one of the primary and most important functions of animation. In fact I assumed these motion constraints would be necessary to do it. My fault I guess for never seeing what was possible in animation.
I hope this functionality is available soon. Fortunately my current project only needs to move left to right but I am having a hard time imagining how any actual animation could be done. For example a roller coaster, an engine, or really anything else that doesn't need to move just up, down, left or right.
Does anyone have an ETA of when this will be available?

[brianrepp]

@yoshimitsuspeed I spoke with the team about it this morning and they realize how frustrating this one is.  As promised in our earlier discussions, I'm going to give a time estimate that's to the best of my current knowledge, even though it might not be what you want to hear - which is, sometime in the next year.

[Yes-Papa]

Hi,

What about constraints and motion studies all to be used in the Animation workspace? Have you got more informations about this next features?

I follow this turorial "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHL8xvC3W1c" an d I'm wondering how to export the animation.

Thank you.

[TimeraAutodesk]

Hi @Yes-Papa, thanks for following up with us on this feature. This is still on our roadmap to get done (bring joints and motion studies into the Animation workspace), but we have some other projects that took presidence and needed to get done first so I don't have a release date to communicate yet. 

As far as exporting videos... there's currently no way to export a video file of a motion study, but if you have created an animation in the Animation Workspace, you can use the Publish tool from the ribbon to publish out a video from there. 

[grxmas04]

Add me to the list for:

1. adding joints and motion links to animation!

2. make animation events editable

3. fix crashes when deleting events in animation

4. exporting videos of motion studies

comment: Why is this a low priority? What good is doing all the work of adding joints and motion links if you can't create a video?

[dphanks]

Just checking in Timera. I'm also trying to use joints I've created in Modelspace to create an animation. Is this items still on the to-do list? How far out is it?