Most reasonable way to animate something like this?

[jjatho]

I've never really dealt with any kind of animation programs before, so this is new territory for me. I did do a search, but it didn't fully answer my question.

 

I use an external program that controls various heavy construction machinery in the 3d environments I work in. My new employer wants me to look into animating the construction plans I come up with, really just for the sake of eye candy for clients.

 

The way the program seems to interact with AutoCAD is via the command line. Every time a I click a button to make an incremental change, it sends a series of commands like:

 

Command: (build_machine

 

with ton of numbers behind it and basically it erases the machine and rebuilds it in the new position. It's all made of up Xrefs.

 

One thought I had was maybe capture all the commands to move the machine through a series of moves, then insert some kind of command between each move to render the image, then put all the separate images into another program to essentially make a cartoon.

 

I've never used 3ds in any capacity, though I suspect it will be something that gets recommended.

[fuccaro]

Not the best way these days, but yes, it is possible to put images one after the other in order to make a short animation. I did so in the past: http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?883-AutoCAD2004-AutoLisp-and-animation&highlight=animation

[JD Mather]

I've never really dealt with any kind of animation programs before,.....

 

Are you limited to using only AutoCAD for this, or do you have a budget to purchase software/training for animation?

 

I remember years ago saving slides in AutoCAD and then writing a bit of code to play back the slides, but I have long forgotten how to do this.

A search might turn up some instructions.

mslide

vslide

[fuccaro]

There was a tutorial on the main page, writen by CADTutor, about slides and slide presentations inside AutoCAD. Probable there is stil there. But if we are talking about 3D, I would render to file (or even just screen-capture some images) and put togheter those images.