Hi, quick question please: Can someone point me to features/commands or resources to help me figure out how to make an animation of a model whose parameters change over time, e.g., pieces of an assembly rotating relative to other pieces, or a plane figure twisting into a 3D curved surface. So to be clear, this is not animating the view of a static/finished model, which seems easy enough using the relevant commands.
thx
Hi @Frank_Revi
There are no object animation tools in Rhino, so you’ll have to rely on either:
- Bongo3D - an animation plugin made by McNeel.
- Learning Grasshopper - which is a native part if Rhino, but has a fairly steep learning curve and is not “meant” for animation. It IS however a great “plugin” and will change the way you use and think about Rhino.
- Learn to use Blender (which is free!), C4D, Max or similar.
HTH, Jakob
Thanks very much, that’s what I need. Yes, I assume there will be some grasshopper involved, I’m also on that learning curve, Much appreciated.
Hi @Frank_Revi
Doug Jones did a bit of this with a script in Rhino pre release version one.
He did it by editing the object/s to their desired state rendering then hitting undo and rendering again, doing that for each step. In a composting program he would reverse the order of the images and then save to a movie/animation format.
I remember he had a dolphin swimming through water where he point edited the water surface and the dolphin solid then did the above process.
RM
Thanks for this, I’m coming to a similar conclusion myself. For my (initial at least) goal, I’m thinking to do a grasshopper program to iteratively generate states of the model, each one of which would get rendered and exported to a PNG. The resulting set of files would get sent to an APNG animation renderer. I’m gathering that Bongo will do transformations, but not progressive changes to specific parameters for example a planar surface gradually twisting into a 3D curved surface. Seems like Bongo’s keyframing can’t be used to morph geometry like that. Blender appears to exclusively deal with meshes, so I’m guessing mathematically specified/constrained changes would be an issue. The kind of thing I’m aiming for is illustrated here. I made that in R some years ago but haven’t touched it since and would have to re-learn that whole world…and the render options in Rhino are so much better. Anyhow, thanks again, much appreciated.
Hi @Frank_Revi,
Nice work on the animation thanks for posting.
I think you’re right Gh is the way to go. You could do this in Blender using geometry nodes which is similar to GH but that would require some diving into if you haven’t used Blender before.
You’ll get good results with Cycles and or even with view captures.
RM
Snapshots may be useful to explore, a very simple kind of animation inside of Rhino.
If you set your blender units to a real-world unit (mm, inches etc.) you can probably get quite far. For most cases the animation only needs to look good rather than being mathematically precise. Check out some Blender geomtry node videos - you can do a lot.
For assembling your PNG sequence almost any video editor will work.
Thank you, I’ll look into that for sure.
-F
e+
Thanks, that’s interesting. There’s also a new CAD-like extension I ran into (name escapes me at the moment). That may be a way forward. Much appreciated.
-F
e+