Add Numerical Speed Control and Higher Step Count for Motion Studies

[brevin.banks]

The current Motion Study tool in Fusion is severely limited by two long-standing issues:

1. The speed slider lacks any numerical input or units, making it impossible to precisely control animation timing. Even at the slowest setting, most animations are far too fast to analyze or present effectively.

2. The 100-step limit is overly restrictive and prevents smooth, professional animations (especially when motion involves multiple joints or slow transitions.)

These limitations have been discussed in the forums for years, but no improvements have been made. Please consider the following updates:

• Add a numerical input field to set duration (seconds), frames per second, or time per step.

• Allow more than 100 steps in a motion study.

• Optionally allow export of the animation locally at user-defined frame rates (not just cloud rendering).

These changes would significantly improve usability for prototyping, product presentations, and functional analysis—without forcing users into Blender, 3DS Max, or Unreal for simple animations.

This is core CAD functionality. Please prioritize these quality-of-life upgrades. 9 years of complaints and work around ought to warrant at least a week for one engineer to attempt something for us please. How to slow down a motion study? Asked by matt 

@TimelesslyTiredYouth  I am causing a ruckus here.

Thanks @jeff_strater  for your past responses — any updates on this issue? 

[TimelesslyTiredYouth]

Not sure if this would fully solve it, but one idea that might be worth trying is using the Animation workspace instead of the Motion Study tool. You can keyframe the motion more precisely there, and then export the animation as an image sequence instead of a video. From there, you could bring those frames into something like DaVinci Resolve or Blender to control the playback speed and frame rate more accurately. It might help bypass the 100-step limit and give smoother results, especially for slower motions. It’s a bit of a workaround, and I haven’t tested it extensively myself as I don't really use motion studies, but could be a decent alternative until Fusion adds proper speed control.

hope it helps 

Ricky

@brevin.banks , yes you are causing a ruckus.

[felipe_anton]

Great idea, the motion study is great but way too fast, you can barely see what is happening even at the slowest setting. Also, it goes along with my joints, something that does not translate into the animation workspace.

[brevin.banks]

That's honestly where I am coming from. My problems with the animation tab is what brought me to motion studies in the first place. 

The animation tab only allows individual movement of components and is agnostic of relationships. It's really only good for getting a few camera angles and showing exploded views. You'd have to animate each joint motion independently and in the case you have joints mapped to rigid groups, each component of the group must be moved on its own. 

To be honest an animation tab with features that let's you animate existing joint relationships would be awesome. The animation tree timeline would need an overhaul however (it may need one anyway since manipulating items on the timeline doesn't work so great - looking at my frustrations with multiselect)

Good suggestion, but honestly just as painful a work around for me as using blender and typically blender works better. The Animation tab also struggles with gimbal lock issues when animating camera or part rotations, and in general lacks any lighting or scene control. Not that motions studies has that, but if I am gonna do all the work to animate each part by hand then I may as well use an environment where I can change the lighting and scene.

But I don't need that fancy stuff if the alternative is really quick and easy. I'm not making Disney Pixar animations here, just quick snippets that show the relationships in a way that is professional enough for project demos. Hence, why just making motion studies better with nice out of the box functionality would be a dream come true.