Animation - Floors and Rendering
Hey @kevinwatts,
Thanks so much for posting your questions - Here's some comments to your questions about Animations in Fusion 360...
1. Is there a way to added for example a floor?
To create a floor, you'd have to model a floor in the Model workspace. Alternatively, you could also turn on the ground shadows option which may get you what you're looking for. Out of curiosity, do you have an example of the type of scene or sample animation you're looking to get out of Fusion?
2. Is there a way to render this with color locally and/or in the A360 Cloud?
We have a Publish to Video option from the ribbon in the Animation workspace. Click the "Publish" command, and set some parameters to get a video saved locally to your machine. This will publish out a video with the same rendering fidelity that you see in the Animation workspace when you play back the animation. As far as being able to publish out a video utilizing the online rendering-as-a-service (A360 workflows), we don't yet have that hooked up. This is on our roadmap, however, and we will be working on this feature set soon.
Again, if you have any additional detail that you can give or samples of the kinds of animations you need to create that would be great for us to see to better understand your workflow and requirements.
Thanks in advance,
Timera
Hey Kevin,
Thanks for the additional detail, I think I can help out here on several of the items. The Animations tools aren't meant as a traditional M&E animation tool, so you're right that you're not going to get Maya-like animations, but it sounds like you're finding what you need here which is good. Here's a few more tips & tricks that you might find useful.
To have more control over the start/stop times of a transform, right-click on the transform action in the timeline and choose Edit Start/End. This will open a mini-dialog box where you can be precise up to 2 decimal points on any given action.
To navigate the scene without "recording" the camera, simply toggle off the camera from the ribbon. This comes in super handy for the use-case you described below. As soon as you toggle the camera recording back on, your view will reset to the last recorded position and you won't have to hassle with akward camera actions on your timeline.
To address your question about rotating along a non-normal axis, I've shot a quick video showing a sample of what I'm interpretting you're trying to do here. Basically, you can use the reorient tool on the Transform dialog to manually move/reorient the triad free in space, or snap it to another component. Also note that for the next release coming out in a couple weeks that we have made some enhancements to this feature which will make it more intuitive and powerful.
I hope this is helpful, please let me know your thoughts! I'd be happy to hop on a gotomeeting with you and walk you through some best practices, as well as get to know your workflow better. If you're interested, let's get something on the calendar!
Best,
Timera
Good morning Kevin,
Great questions! I've added my responses in-line below in blue for clarity.
1. I also need to bring the final AVI in to PowerPoint. I Published a test in "full screen." It imported but the image is not as clear as I would like. Granted I am rendering locally, is there a render ("Publish") preset would you recomend that I try. Have you tried changing the resolution in the Publish dialog? 1920 x 1080 is currently the highest resolution that we're able to publish out right now, because we are using local compute to perform this operation. When we get the Animation workspace hooked up to RaaS (using cloud compute), we'll have much more control over resolution, but in all transparency that's still several months away.
2. I like the idea of generating an exploded view. Is there a way to capture a still image at a frame along the timeline?
Exploded View support is not an "official" workflow yet - although we are currently working on it. In the meantime, you can use a simple workaround to get a basic view from anywhere on the timeline. Drag the playhead to the desired location on the timeline for the view you want, then from the File dropdown menu, select Capture Image. This will save a full-screen image of the model at that point in time and save it locally to your drive.
3. After an animation is created, is it possble to add a few seconds to the begining and end of the timeline using the matching view?
I'm not sure I understand your question, can you explain what you mean by "matching view"?
4. Is there a way to add text? Like a begining and ending title. I think Callouts would require action on the part of the user to show. I would just like to add a simple title.
You are right, Callouts require some interaction from the user to expand and show the text. We don't currently have any way in-canvas to show any text, but this is something I'd like to hear more about. Are you hoping to have the text show up inside the viewer? You can, however, change the title of the Storyboards, and they will permeate through the viewer as the title for the animation in the navigation menu. Double-click on a Storboard tab to change it's name.
Be sure to let me know how this all goes for you, and I'm looking forward to setting up some more time to chat with you.
Best,
Timera
