An alternative to the animation tool

[Cadplan Architecture]

When I’m drawing up houses I like to spin the model round on screen using the flyover tool, it’s great and far easier to control than the animation tools, I wish that Vectorworks would introduce this type of intuitive interactive tool for making short movies, at the moment I use screen capture but it’s not ideal.

[Josh Loy]

@Cadplan Architecture Sorry to hear about your frustrations with the animation tools and please let us know if you have ideas of how to improve it.  Are you suggesting a way to "record" a path animation instead of using saved views or polylines?  I know a lot of people will use a SpaceMouse along with QuickTime to record realtime fly through movies.

[Jeff Prince]

@Josh Loy it would be handy if Vectorworks could use Saved Views as keyframes for an animation instead of having to draw a path for a camera to follow.  I imagine most of us find it pretty easy to set up a handful of key views compared to drawing animation paths.

 

Here is a rudimentary example I just made using saved views.  It would so much smoother if Vectorworks could switch between the views without changes in acceleration or pauses for clicks, yet sometimes these qualities are helpful when presenting and discussing a model (the acceleration and stopping when departing/arriving at a view).

 

 

 

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

There appears to be a command in Vectorworks to make a movie from Saved Views.  I just did a test and it worked.  If I recall this was the way Vectorworks used to do walkthrough animation, but they had "Velocity Beads" to control the action between each View or Keyframe.  

 

Regardless,  there are a number of issues with Fly through animation that would have to be addressed to make it easier.    In the short term though, being able to select a target object to keep the camera firmly focused on the object of interest would be very helpful.  If the target object could be animated itself, it would make it even better. 

 

[BartH]

There is a pretty good tutorial from the Austin VW User group.
Is this what you are looking for? 

 

 

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

@Josh Loy  In the original Create Animation from path of years gone by, there were "velocity beads" that would control the "ease in/ease out functions" of an animation from key frame to key frame.  I can't seem to find that anymore?

 

Are they still there somewhere in another form.

 

Paul

 

[Josh Loy]

@VIRTUALENVIRONS Do you mean the Speed slider?  When it's set to a negative value for a keyframe it will cause the animation to spend more time around that keyframe.

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

9 minutes ago, Josh Loy said:

Do you mean the Speed slider

Yes I saw that, did not know if it was for the whole animation or not.  The velocity beads were in the form of a graph, so you could play with the entire animation, etc.

 

Anyway, thanks for the info.

 

 

 

[Cadplan Architecture]

On 5/23/2024 at 5:11 PM, BartHays said:

There is a pretty good tutorial from the Austin VW User group.
Is this what you are looking for? 

 

 

Thanks, I used to use animation as it was easy in earlier versions of VW, this example is good but I'm looking for something that you can records as you move the mouse so interactive. For now I will see if I can find an up to date movie of how to use the animation tool and hope that Vectorworks produce a new visualisation tool. for 2025.

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

59 minutes ago, Cadplan Architecture said:

I used to use animation as it was easy in earlier versions of VW,

I just did another test using "Create Animation from Saved Views".  It still appears to work the same as the older version.  The velocity beads have been replaced by a slider that affects each keyframe, but essentially the same.

Having said that, of the two, I would be inclined to use Path.  

If Path animation had an option to choose a target that the camera would stay focused on, it would solve a lot of issues.