More animation techniques

Learning objectives

In this tutorial you'll animate the teakettle that was modeled in a previous tutorial. We'll examine some of the more advanced concepts of presentation animation, like more complicated animations, animating the environment, and rendering the animation.

You'll learn how to:

set an object's pivot point for tighter rotation

review and edit animations for object collisions

use the SBD window

use the Shaders window to set Environment shaders

edit Environment shaders

use and edit grid textures

animate the Environment shader

use the Animation > Show > View frame menu item

use the Parameter Control window to set attributes

render an animation

use FCheck to view the rendered animation (in Windows)

New menu items used in this tutorial

Animation > Editors > Param control

Animation > Show > FCheck

Animation > Show > View frame

Render > Globals

Setting the View Window Names

Before you begin this tutorial, you may need to adjust preferences to show tutorial window names.

Choose File > New.

If the four windows are named Top, Left, Back and Perspective, you'll need to change a setting for this tutorial.

Open Preferences > General Preferences to the Model Windows section, and click to place a check mark beside Use Tutorial Window Names.

Click Go.

This changes the names of the Left and Back windows to Front[Left] and Right[Back]. We'll be using the names that are outside the square brackets. These are names traditionally associated with DesignStudio and Studio; AliasStudio is moving the names of these windows to the names in brackets, however, this tutorial still uses the older DesignStudio window names.

This option requires that you exit AliasStudio and restart the application before continuing with the tutorial, so choose File > Exit and then start the application again.

Watch Part 1 of the tutorial.

To open the tutorial file

Open the file called more_animation.wire, located in the wire sub-directory of the Courseware directory.

For information on how to open a file, see the Animation Basics tutorial.

The file is displayed.