Thanks for the info. They are interesting products, but they don't appear to do exactly what I need. Not only that, but I'm on a Mac, and they're Windows-only. Thanks though.

-Steve

Thanks for the reply, Chris. Gosh, that sure renders (no pun intended) them useless for my purposes. It's difficult for me to imagine why Google would build animation capabilities into the product without the ability to somehow "record" them so they could be incorporated into a video or multimedia presentation somehow. What a disappointment.

-Steve

Hi all,

I'm not exactly a SU newbie, but I just started looking into DC's, and they seem pretty cool. However, for my purposes, DC animations are not particularly useful unless they can be exported as part of a SU animation. My question is therefore, is it possible to export DC animations somehow?

-Steve

@gaieus said:

Steve- I haven't played around with this but what if you set the origin of both your parent and child component to the original world axis?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't see how that will help, as I need the components to rotate about different axes.

I've been trying some paper folding animations using nested components. The animation of a nested component works as expected when in the context of (i.e. editing) the parent component. However, when not in component edit mode, the nested component does not animate properly. It does move - but typically way out of view, off in left field. It appears that when you're editing the parent component, the nested component's motion is relative to its parent, but when not editing the parent component, the motion is relative to something else.

Any chance this could be "fixed" so that nested components always move relative to their parent?

-Steve

@malaise said:

What kind of software do you use to display this small picture?

It's actually an embedded Flash animation. You should get a contextual menu when you right click on it. Select "Play" to view the animation.

-Steve

@dave r said:

what if you make the rotating part a component instead of a group and place its axis so the origin is at the center of rotation.

Interesting you should mention this. A couple days ago I did just that in an effort to get my paper folding animation to work. (Right click and choose play.)

[flash=200,193:21jtvhjy]http://www.adeptool.com/anim/PaperFold.swf[/flash:21jtvhjy]

-Steve

Nifty. If you figure out how to animate the folding, let me know! I've been wanting to create some animated tutorials on how to make a paper airplane.

-Steve

Thanks for the reply, Dave.

@dave r said:

First, to force the axis of rotation to be along the fold line, get the Rotate tool. Click on the end of the fold line and while holding the mouse button, drag along the fold line. Let go of the button and click again for the start of the rotation as normal.

Yep, that much I know. It's animating the folding of the paper that I can't do.

@dave r said:

As far as the animation part, you'll see in the Read Me file that edges and faces do not have transformation data.

Yep, I saw that in the Read Me file.

@dave r said:

You need to make components or groups of the separate parts. SO each smaller face created by a fold will need to be a separate component.

And that's precisely what I did. I used the line tool to draw a diagonal line across the piece of paper. I then made one of the resulting triangles a group and rotated only that group. However, it doesn't rotate about the fold - hence the reason for my post.

This should all be obvious in the file I attached. I'm still at a loss for how to force the axis of rotation to be at the fold line during the animation.

Regards,

-Steve

I'd like to create some paper folding animations using SU (making a paper airplane for example). I thought this would be simple, but I can't get the fold animations to work right. I've tried the recently announced proper_animation script, but I can't force the axis of rotation to be the fold line. Could SU Animate do this? My 10 day trial just expired, so I can't try it. I'm sure I could take the tedious and wrong approach by manually creating scenes, but there has to be a better way.

See attached for an example. You have to install the proper_animation script and start the animation observer before clicking the scene tabs.

Any help would be appreciated.

-Steve

PaperFold.skp