Animate Objects

In Navisworks, you can animate your model and interact with it. For example, you can animate how a crane moves around a site, or how a car is assembled or dismantled. With a few mouse clicks, you can also create interaction scripts, which link your animations to specific events, such as “On Key Press” or “On Collision”. So, for example, a conveyor belt will move when you press a button on your keyboard, and doors will open as you approach them in your model.

Scope

Navisworks supports both object animation and object interaction as follows:

• Animation specified by keyframes with linear interpolation between keyframes (similar to viewpoints animation).
• Camera, section plane, object animation.
• Multiple independently moving objects independently started.
• Multiple animations of the same object in the same scene (for example, moving a crane, and then lifting its arm).
• Simple scripts (for example, to open and close a specified door).
• Linking to TimeLiner to trigger off independent animations as tasks start.
• Linking to TimeLiner with different TimeLiner tasks play to specific points in an animation (for example, have one animation that moves crane between all points on a site, any task can trigger animation to move from current point to desired point).
• Linking to Clash Detective to run clash tests at specific steps through an animation to check for animated versus animated or animated versus static object clashes. The Clash Detective feature is available for Autodesk Navisworks Manage users only.

The following is not currently supported:

• Animation specified by anything other than objects, for example spline or path.
• Animation of lights.
• Moving a whole object and then creating an independent trigger to move part of object (for example, move whole crane and have button that triggers arm moving at any point).
• Opening/closing of multiple doors without having to create a separate script and animation for each door. Currently there are no cut-and-paste capabilities in scripting.
• Linking to TimeLiner to have different TimeLiner tasks trigger animations that depend on each other (for example, one task moves crane to a specific point, another task moves arm of crane).
• Real-time collision checking where you turn it on, play an animation and have animation stop when moving object first hits something.