Basic Animation

In this tutorial you will be introduced to the Shaper animation tools by animating a cylinder.

Start by creating a long thin cylinder with height segmentation equal to 2. Activate the Frame All tool to center all the views on the cylinder.

Skeletal animation requires bones. Create 3 bones within the cylinder. Place the first bone, the root bone, at the bottom. Place the second bone in the middle and the final bone at the top. The best way to do this is to use the Bone Creation tool and click to place each bone in the front view. In this example it is not necessary for the bones to be placed precisely.

The next step is to attach the vertices to the bones. This can be done using the Automatic Skinning tool as described in the Skinning tutorial. Activate the Automatic Skinning tool and use the default values.

The cylinder is now ready to be animated. Create a new animation using the New Animation tool which is located in the Animation menu. Create a new animation with 50 frames.

The current animation is selected using the box in the lower right of the screen on the Animation Bar. The animation that has just been created is automatically selected.

The next step is to add key frames that animate the bones which will animate the cylinder. Adding a key frame is simple. Start by toggling Animate mode by pressing the Animate button in the lower right of the screen. Notice when you toggle Animate mode various tools on the Animation Bar are enabled.

When in Animate mode all bone transformations automatically become key frames. You will add a key frame that bends the cylinder in the middle of the animation. To do this start by using the Time Control tool to move to the middle frame.

The next step is to rotate the middle bone. The process for doing this is covered in the Transforming Primitives tutorial. Select the middle bone. Acitvate the rotation tool and use the rotation Gizmo to rotate the bone about the X axis.

Note a green dot has appeared at the bottom of the screen. This indicates that a key frame exists for the currently selected bone. The Track View shows all the key frames in a scene. The Track View can be shown by using the Track View button on the Tool Bar.

The basic animation is now complete. If yout move the time control slider you will notice that the cylinder "bends" to the key frame.

If you are new to skeletal animation it would be worth while trying out a few more animations. What happens if apply translation instead of rotation? What happens if you go back to the skinning step and limit the maximum bones per vertex to 1?