combine animation from animator and timeliner sequence

[andy_v2633328]

Hi!

Basically i have a short animation sequence of some trucks entering a building site created under the Animator tab. Then i have a building construction simulation generated with the TimeLiner. I want to be able to play the animation of trucks while the construction sequence is being generated. Is this possible, and how do i go about linking them together?

Cheers!

[JeffHUK]

Hi there,

This is indeed possible, but may be fiddly depending on your precise arrangement of animations & tasks.

To link an animation with Timeliner, you need to go to the associated task in Timeliner and set the linked animation to point to the desired animation. You then get three choices of scaling - start at task start, end at task end, or scale. Unless your animation is modeled in real time and thus Timeliner task durations will match with your actual animation scale, you probably want the animation to be scaled to the task duration.

The trick is getting your animation to play for the length of the sequence. You need to pick a task that matches the entire length of construction tasks. You can always make one by hand that has the correct dates if necessary.

Please note that in Navisworks 2011 there are some known issues with animations & Timeliner - the most relevant being that animations will only play at actual dates (if you are using planned dates the animations' start & end will not match up). These are being looked at for future releases.

Hope that helps,

Jeff

[andy_v2633328]

Hey Jeff!

Thanks so much for the quick reply. I managed to get things working eventually....well kind of. The only problem now is as you mentioned getting the animation to play properly.

I played around with the scale and start/end time settings but none provided the right results. The animation would start playing at the appropriate time but then it gets cut short. I also tried to change the overall length of the simulation but that would just end up slowing everything down. Oh well nevermind :s

Thanks again for the reply!