Hi everyone,
I work in Rhino + V-Ray, but I still haven’t been able to fully get into Grasshopper. I normally create simple turntable animations directly in V-Ray, but for the first time I need to animate a part moving linearly — and I’m honestly shocked there’s still no straightforward way to do this natively.
I’ve been reading the forums, googling, and even asking AI, but I still don’t understand how to create such a basic animation. I have the scene ready in Rhino, with all materials and lighting set up in V-Ray.
My goal is very simple:
→ A group of objects needs to move 1299 mm along the Y axis, rendered as an animation in V-Ray.
I’ve attached a screenshot of my current Grasshopper setup and a screen capture of the scene.
Any guidance or example setup would be hugely appreciated.
Thank you!
I know what you mean 
Actual GH is way more useful than screenshots alone. 
Simple animations like this can be created by right-clicking the Y ‘Factor’ slider and choose ‘Animate’ to save a series of images to a folder. Then other tools are needed (GIMP or a video editor like Pinnacle Studio) to assemble the series of images into a GIF or video.
P.S. A series of images can be used to create an interactive animation like this: (use the ‘Position’ button and drag the slider back and forth)
As I recall, the GH animate feature generates an HTML file that shows the saved images in a similar manner.
The trick is that you need the “Fraction” output of the timeline. It is a value between 0 at frame 1 and 1 at the last frame. You multiply that with the slider where you have 1299. Now once you render your timeline you will slowly move the geometry to 1299. Use a graph mapper if you need EaseIn/Out or similar effects.
Hey,
@Joseph_Oster and @Armin Seltz
Thanks for your valuable suggestions.
I spent a couple of hours experimenting with different nodes and managed to create a simple animation (linear motion of a part). Along the way, I realized that I have to build the materials and scene setup directly in Grasshopper for V-Ray to render everything correctly.
To be honest, the V-Ray setup in Grasshopper feels a bit limited (or maybe I just haven’t explored it enough yet). Either way, it seems like it takes quite a bit of time to set up, and I’m not sure it’s worth it for simple tasks.
I’ve attached my GH file here — it’s not fully prepared for rendering (materials and scene aren’t fully set), but I thought it might still be helpful for others like me who are just getting started with V-Ray in Grasshopper. There isn’t much documentation or examples out there, so hopefully this helps someone.
simple animation.gh (12.4 KB)
I’m not playing with V-Ray. Besides, your geometry is not internalized in the GH file.
