Ideas for Animation workspace Ive just spent 5 days straight in Fusions Animator - OMG its beautiful. Coming from inventors presentations and studio, the fusion animation while first a little frustrating is after several days of learning now a beautiful thing. Over these 50 fish hours I came up agains a lot of little quirks and build a list of wishes. Most of which have been forgotten however some happened often enough that I could remember them and have noted them below in case a) I’m doing something wrong and you can tell me about it or b) They are quirks and you want to know about them. c) You want to include some of the functionality I have wished for in this experience Rotations sometimes go wrong way * When you manually dial a little on on of the orbit arcs during a rotation transformation, sometimes when it should show negative degrees it does not, and on these occasions the animation when playing goes opposite way to that which was selected during the transformation. * Some values, such as 1080, often don’t produce a rotation, (Either both No rotation in animation and no rotation icon in storyboard, other times rotation Icon but not actual visible rotation) Often swapping to a value not divisible by 90 will get you a work around. * If there is already a move transformation on a component, you cannot always add rotation to it, frequently the exiting movement must be deleted. * Frequently creating a movement (drag an arrow) and also a rotation at once fails. Both the icons are placed in storyboard however only the drag movement shows in the animation Trails randomly switch on, often after / during reversals of storyboard This one is interesting, I’ve watched videos 20 times with no trails and hen suddenly you rewind a few seconds and it throws in a trail. or a bunch of trails. On components you haven’t touched for hours. Not always a result of reversals. Component Selection When Dragging a square around components to select as a group, some components that are behind others (but still inside square) are not selected. Some small part of each component must be visible in order for it to be selected. Generally you can rotate a little to make sure all parts are visible (not always though) and even then its a pain to have to pause the camera view to orbit around looking for a view that will show all parts to be selected and then checking parts are all selected. You cannot always right click to ‘edit’ an action icon in the storyboard - frequently edit is missing from the list and you need to left click and highlight a different transformation so that you can then re right click the transformation your looking to edit and then.. the edit option is then enabled. This is generally if its a transformation thats currently in view (even if paused). So another way around it is to move the animation vertical line away from the component your trying to edit. Show Hide * Show hide transformations cannot be performed on callouts! Ohh so sad! Being that 360 designs can be embedded in a webpage with both the part and animation available for people to view and play with, its sad callouts can’t be seen. For a assembly guide the embed functionality is beautiful but almost useless without callouts and so we are back to making videos and hosting them on youtube so we can add subtitles. Is such lovely functionality for an assembly document to be able to offer a html embedded fusion cad assembly for the user to poke around in, and to watch the animations, but it all falls apart with out callouts. * Show Hide Transformations cannot be performed on Selection Groups, this is a bit sad as would be terribly handy. Often you want to hide a whole bunch of components then bring them back in later in the story - would be great to be able to add them to a selection group before hiding, so you can bring them back easily - especially in light of the next quirk below. * Show Hide has no time in transition by default, and cannot be set in preferences. I would almost never flash hide or show a component in a single frame - fade in allows the viewer time to know that a part is coming in or leaving, a change over time catches attention more than gone in a flash which can be missed while you blink. If a gap is left in the storyboard between the last transformation and the cursor line - show hide should fill this time with a fade in/out - just as other transformations change over time to fill the space. Instead show/hide leaves blank space and then a tiny icon for show/hide that is so small that you cannot select it, or get mouse arrows up on it to drag it wider, without considerable difficulty. This is most difficult when you have 40 or 50 parts to fade out, with the show/hide icon so short in the storyboard it takes forever to highlight 50 items to try and drag them wider. Once all are selected you have to scroll around the storyboard to find the last transformation to see how far to drag these show/hides back to and if there is not one within reach (vertically) on the story board you have to enlarge the storyboard so that they are both in view or do look at the timestamp to match it. blah blah winge winge please can we have a preference to turn on fade time;) Story Board Reversal Doesn’t always work like you would expect. Story board reversal is not as close to rewind as it seems to be, could be. If I’m careful I can get a clip to reverse correctly, but its very easy to screw up. When using it for how to assemble videos, I fly everything out and then hide it, hoping to reverse the storyboard at the end and have a magical how to video. However I often need to pan and rotate components and groups of components or assemblies during the disassembly (via transformation not via camera views) and … if I accidentally include a component that I have already finished disassembling and hiding (easy to do), it looks ok in forwards direction which means I go hours further down the road… when I reverse you can see that it has moved while hidden and it looks uncannily the same as when I let my toddler pack the dishwasher, or when she goes to my office to play with my organised piles of receipts at tax time - same same result in the storyboard after reversal. Its almost impossible to recover a storyboard once you have done this, if there was a button though that said “Ignore transformations on hidden items during reversal” that would be magic. That or I can just stop screwing it up. But food for though as it can be many many hours down the drain if you make the simple mistake. Other Wishlist Items / niggles * When you add a transformation, storyboard could update its position to show you the icons for this transformation, to save you scrolling around looking for them. * Also nice would be a menu button to momentarily filter the storyboard items only to those lines with icons crossing the vertical line on the storyboard, as in the lines (components) your currently working with. *Story board doesn’t always scroll nicely, frequently has a little hiccup and lag. Also icons move a few pixels vertically when selecting them (sometimes) *Story board does not allow you to scroll very far to the right when there is no content there. It would be nice to be able to fill the whole storyboard screen with new upcoming unused (not green) space so that we are not always working at the tight hand side of the screen and constantly scrolling another couple of inches of blank storyboard into view. *The bottom line of the story board is frequently getting caught up in the horizontal scroller that appears if you take your curser anywhere near it. Makes it difficult to select transformation icons on the bottom component - Almost impossible if that happens to be one of the afore complained about single frame show hide icons;) Lastly of course, would love to have access to constraints in the animation side, I know this has been requested in the past and will be again. We just spend allot of time setting up joints and to not have access to them when they would me most useful seems sad. I can only imaging how many thousands of hours of coding its going to take you guys to push joints through to the animation side and so I’ll be patient.
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