Creating Dynamic Animations for your NavVisworks Timeliner

Welcome back to the NavVisworks video series. In this video we'll be looking at how to tie animations in with your task timeliner. These animations serve no other purpose other than visual appeal, but if you have some extra time and you want to, you can create animations and then tie them in with your timeliner.

We'll be using the bim361model.nwf that's located in your lesson 5 folder, and the first thing we need to do is change our column views in timeliner to extended. So this video we're going to switch back to Animator. In the tools tab make sure you turn on Animator.

You'll see that it takes place within timeliner as well, and then we'll make a new scene and let's call this scene walls. Our goal for this wall animation is to take the external walls, all these four on the outside of the building, and build them up from bottom to top. And we'll do that by using the translate gizmo, but first we have to create an animation set.

So let's make a selection of all of the exterior walls, including these two walls right next to the curtain wall, and then you want to right click on walls and then go to add animation set from current selection. Let's call this one exterior walls. Next we want to make sure our scrubber is set to zero, and then take the scale animation set, and then before we set a keyframe we want to make sure that this scale animation gizmo is set to zero.

The X and y doesn't matter, it's actually taking place in the center of all of these objects. So let's set z to zero. Now we can set our keyframe.

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So this keyframe is set with the walls fully built, so we'll want to move this out to, say, the two second mark. The length of the animation, if we're going to be using it within Timeliner, doesn't matter. Let's go back to zero with our scrubber, and then we'll take the gizmo and we'll just drag the z direction down as far as we can, sort of flattening the walls, and we can capture that keyframe.

Now if we preview, we'll see that walls get built up to maximum, and that's exactly the result that we want to see. We can turn off the translate animation scale. Now we can go back to Timeliner and set this animation to our task.

So that's going to be for walls. Because we added the extra columns, we can scroll all the way over and select our animation from the animation column, and we're going to select walls exterior. Let's go to simulate tab in Timeliner and see if that works for us.

See that we have an animation as the walls are being built, and if we want to see that a little clearer, we can change the construct model appearance, start appearance to model appearance, and then see what that looks like. The same effect can be had for other types of animations. It doesn't have to just be scale.

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We can actually pop the windows in from a different location. Just as an example, I'm going to make a new set. I can capture the current keyframe, move it forward, and then with my translate animation set, move my scrubber back to zero, and then change the location of these windows to somewhere out here, capture keyframe.

Then in Timeliner, when my windows come up, go to window animation, and then let's see what happens. Again, this is an entirely optional thing to do with your Timeliner and Animator, but it's just one way to get clever with your at Timeliner animations. Thanks for watching.

I hope you enjoyed. I'll see you next time.