Animate (alpha)

Animate makes the parts you choose move: a fan that spins, a lever that swings, a part that shakes, a part that travels along a path. The motion is a view, not an edit: the model is not changed, and a saved scene or an export sees every part where it started.

Open it

• Right-click a part, a group in the tree, or the view with something selected, and choose Animate….
• Or open the command search and choose Animate the selection…, or press ShiftA, or click the clapperboard on the bottom toolbar.

Five kinds of motion

Spin

Turns round an axis (X, Y or Z, clockwise or counter) at 1 to 600 turns a minute.

Swing

Rocks to and fro round an axis by an angle of 1 to 180 degrees, in 0.2 to 20 seconds.

Noise

A shake of the position and the turn: wave, smooth random or steps. Set how far it moves (in mm) and turns (up to 90 degrees) on each axis, how fast, how fine and how rough, with a seed and a dice for a new one.

Path

A trip along a circle, a figure of eight, a rounded square, a wave or a line, in the plane you choose, from 5 mm to 1 m across.

Oscillate

A to-and-fro on all three axes at once, for pistons, rockers and pumps. Pick a wave: Sine, Piston (the real motion of a crank turning a rod, with a rod ratio to tune), Eased or Triangle. Set how far it shifts (mm) and turns (degrees) on each axis, and the time of one to-and-fro. Axis lag makes each axis run behind the one before, which turns X and Y into a circle or an ellipse; Turn lag runs the turn behind the shift. It loops for ever, with no seam.

Spin and path also loop: Loop, Ping-pong or Once, with two handles on a small timeline for where in the cycle it starts and ends. A part or group can have one layer of each kind, and the layers add up. A group moves all its parts together, about the middle of the group.

Play it

Under the title bar a playbar has rewind, play and pause, the time, a scrubber over one cycle, and a speed button that steps through 0.25×, 0.5×, 1×, 2× and 4×. Space plays or pauses and Home rewinds while the window has focus. In the scene lists everything that is animated: click a row to select it, or the bin to take its animation away.

While the window is open, a pill in the view says Animate mode, Playing or Paused, with play and exit buttons. Click it to bring the window back.

The timeline

Animate is a drawer along the bottom of the view, set out like a video editor: a ruler, one row for every animated object and a bar for every motion. Drag the ruler or the playhead to scrub. A bar runs from its delay to its repeats: drag its end to change the repeats and the bar itself to change the delay. Pop out turns the drawer back into the small window.

While something is animated, the right-hand column has an Animation card: play and pause, back to the start and to the end, play backwards, a loop button that steps through Loop, Ping-pong and Once, a scrubber with the time gone and the time left, and a miniature of the timeline. It goes when nothing is animated, and nothing runs while it is paused.

Take it out

• In the Export window, Include animation (GLB and glTF) writes the motion of every part that moves as glTF keyframes, 30 a second, over the length of the timeline.
• The timeline can be rendered to a WebM video over its own length, without the view turning. The turntable video plays the animations too.

What to know

• Animations keep running after you close the window or change the selection, until you remove them or close the scene.
• They are saved with a scene and come back when it is opened (the parts are found again by name). An export puts every part back first, unless you include the animation.
• Pressing a gizmo handle on something that is animated takes its animation away first. No gizmo shows while the window is open, and Edit mesh is off.
• The exploded view works together with animations.
• The turntable video plays them, each frame at its own time.

Claude can set this up for you with animate_parts: it adds, removes, lists or clears animations by part, name or group.