You can generate a new shape from an animated object such as a plane or curve using and . See Apply animation snapshot and Apply animated sweep.
Animation Snapshot creates copies of animated objects at intervals of a playback range. Animation Snapshot works on NURBS or polygonal geometry. You cannot use Animation Snapshot on objects animated with dynamics and Inverse Kinematics (IK).
When Construction History is on during an Animation Snapshot, you can edit the animation to affect the generated geometry.
Because Animation Snapshot and Animated Sweep evaluate the animation and create geometry for each By Time position, considerable processing time occurs for complex objects and animation.
Use Animated Sweep to create surface geometry from an animated curve. Animated Sweep operates on animated object transformations that have explicit connections to all the nodes connected to the geometry. Geometry animated by dynamics, Inverse Kinematics (IK), and self-referencing expressions, for example, cannot be used to generated Animation Snapshot geometry. Animated sweep is similar to performing an Animation Snapshot of a curve and a subsequent Loft operation.
A simple example of an Animated Sweep would be to create a spiraling tube that decreases in diameter, much like an animal’s horn. See Apply animated sweep.
Select Modify > Evaluate Nodes > Snapshots. A checkmark appears beside the Snapshots menu item when it is on, and disappears when it is off.
Animation Snapshot and Animated Sweep create construction history. This means you can edit the animation used to generate the Animation Snapshot and Animated Sweep geometry.
You can save considerable processing time in complex Animation Snapshot and Animated Sweep operations by turning off construction history. To delete the construction history, select .