Simple animation...?

[vulcan]

I've been useing VW for 1.5 years now...mostly 2D floor plans. I would like to incorporate a simple moveing arrow...to highlight airflow. Is this possible? If so, can you set me in the right direction? Animation novice

[vulcan]

quote:

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Originally posted by vulcan:

I've been useing VW for 1.5 years now...mostly 2D floor plans. I would like to incorporate a simple moveing arrow...to highlight airflow. Is this possible? If so, can you set me in the right direction? Animation novice

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Doesnt anyone out there care? pls help me...your future may drpemd on it

[vulcan]

quote:

---

Originally posted by vulcan:

Originally posted by vulcan:

I've been useing VW for 1.5 years now...mostly 2D floor plans. I would like to incorporate a simple moveing arrow...to highlight airflow. Is this possible? If so, can you set me in the right direction? Animation novice

Doesnt anyone out there care? pls help me...your future may DEpend on it that is hehe

[RBKarcht]

I don't believe that VectorWorks allows you to animate any object except the camera/observer. Coming from other software that incorporated a more detailed, object-oriented timeline, that has been a minor annoyance.

More annoying yet is the lack of stability in VW 8.5 & VW 9 while generating movies. Using a G4 667 with 512 MB RAM, I get frequent lockups at various stages of creating a movie. VW 9 has plenty of other problems, but that lock-up problem is unique in v.8.5 (otherwise stable).

Sorry that this information doesn't help much.

[Slavin]

Vulcan do you have Photoshop 6 ?

If so Photoshop 6 has the ability to create gif animation, you could export your 2d plan to an image file then import it into Photoshop's gif program Imageready and create an animated arrow that way

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Heath Moloney

Slavin Architects

[Guest]

It's possible to do simple animations of the sort you apparently require, but it takes a little work. One way you can do this is to create an 'airflow arrow' symbol that contains all the arrows for each frame of the animation. Inside the symbol, each of the arrows should be in a different class, so that you have a class for each frame: animation-1, animation-2, etc. Place your airflow arrow symbols around the drawing as appropriate. By changing the visibility of the animation classes so each one is made visible in turn, you can produce a little animation. Using VectorScript, you can create a small script that cycles through the animation classes so that the animation can be seen in real time.

Clearly, the technique above uses a lot of classes very quickly! Another way you could go about this is to use a plug-in object for the arrow, and then have your script change the parameters for the plug-in.

Once you get the animation working, it's a simple matter to add QuickTime support to your script (there are some QuickTime functions in VectorScript that really are easy to use) so that you can save a movie that shows the animation. A movie will give a smoother appearance.

Hope that helps.