Shade 9 Chapter 8 Creating an Animation

In this chapter you’ll learn how to animate an object.

Steps for Creating an Animation

The general process for animating in Shade usually is as follows:

1. Create the object or objects you wish to animate.
2. Create joints to facilitate the animation.
3. Setup the animation in the Motion window.
4. Adjust the animation settings and export the animation.

Animating Text

Here we will animate some text. Select File > New to open a new scene.

1. Select TextEffector from the Create tool to open the TextEffector dialog.
   
2. Click the Size button at the bottom of the TextEffector dialog to adjust the size. Let’s enter 2500 mm for the width of the text. Click OK.
   
3. We can leave the remaining TextEffector settings as the default values, so click OK again to close the dialog and create the text. You’ll see the text appear in the Figure window as a three-dimenstional object. To get a better view of the text, in the Perspective view switch to Shading display mode. (For more information on the preview display mode, see “Preview Display Mode.”
   
4. The text is not quite centered along the z axis, so use Translate from the Move tool to move the text to the left in the Side view.
5. Select Rotator from the Part tool. A rotator is used to create a joint which can rotate about an axis. In the Front view, click and drag in a vertical direction from about the top of the “a” directly downwards, as shown. This imaginary line will be the axis of the rotator joint.
   
6. In the Browser you will see a new part labeled “Rotator.” We want the text part to be inside the rotator joint, so click the “Shade” part in the Browser and move it inside the “Rotator” part. Then click the “Rotator” part to select it.
   
7. Select View > Motion to open the Motion window. Next click the black triangle in the top left corner of the window to open the Animation Settings, and adjust the settings as shown below:
8. In the pull-down menu on the bottom left of the Motion window, select the rotator. Now turn on the Sequence and Autokey checkboxes.
   
9. To make the animation a little easier to apply, click the + (plus) button at the top left of the window to set the magnification to 6.
10. The length of the timeline can be adjusted by using the - and + buttons underneath the Rotator part in the Motion window, as shown.
11. The sequence cursor should be at the far left of the timeline. Click the + button to the left of the “key” icon in the top right of the Motion window to add a keypoint to the timeline. Repeat this step to add keypoints to the timeline while moving the sequence cursor to the right. With the right keypoint selected, enter 360 into the numerical textbox on the left. This specifies the value of the rotator joint at the end of the timeline. In this case, we want the text to rotate a full 360 degrees during the animation. Next select the left keypoint and enter 0. Click the Play button at the top of the Motion window to preview the animation.
    
12. Now that we have finished adding keypoints and adjusting the timeline and animation settings we are ready to export the motion as a finished, rendered animation. Select Rendering > Create Animation.
13. Select a location and name for the movie file. Select *.mov to save the animation as a QuickTime Movie file.
14. The next dialog presents a list of compression settings. Unless you need to conserve your system’s resources you can probably leave these settings as-is.
15. Click OK a final time to begin rendering the animation. Shade renders a series of still images frame by frame. The current frame being rendered and the total number of frames in the animation is displayed in the title bar of the Image window, showing the progress of the animation rendering.
16. When the rendering finishes, navigate to the Movie file you saved and open the file in an appropriate video player program to check your results. |