Animation Using Visualize Professional - Does Any Product Support Exist?!

I know that was directed towards rob but from my experience so It's pretty much just key frame for now but has some cool stuff like automatic rotation animation and tools for wheels on cars so that they are grouped together and move as you would expect. Not tried it yet, could use your excellent Aston or Porsche models to give it a go when i get time.Also you can do automatic turntable animations,  vr output and panaramic outputs, we have some examples on our website, put together pretty hastily prior to my webcasts

https://www.solidsolutions.co.uk/solidworks/Visualize/Interactive-Examples/default.aspx

SOLIDWORKS Visualize Animations

Not sure if i have missed anything else, but they are targeting the import of animations from SOLIDWORKS for the future obviously no guarantees when that will be. My experience so far of rendering is that the lighting is far better for visualize animations, it is easier to get a conistant result without flickering of light/ shadows, just don't have enough control in photoview to always get a good result.

Hey Mark,

Well its my opinion of course but since you asked .......

At this moment in time SW/PV360 animations are far more robust then Visualize animations.  This is purely because of the animation capability in SW (really has nothing to do with PV360) is much easier to set up, control and has much more capability.  At this point I wouldn't be leaving SW/PV360 to do animation work in Visualize and I certainly wouldn't spend $3K for the limited animation abilities Visualize Pro gives you.

Anything more than camera animations, 360 turntables or simple geometry moves (like Alan's examples show) and you've reached the limits of Visualize animations.  Technically you can group "parts" in Visualize and create more complex animations (moving linkages, etc.) but the geometry tree and tools to do this are not the best and its so much easier and faster to do that type of animation in SW that I'm not sure why anyone would want to even attempt it in Visualize.  The real downfall (as with so many other push button rendering/animation packages NOT just Visualize) is the lack of ability to "work" (group, section, deform, constrain, etc) with geometry.  The SW user has a certain level of geometry control (separate from creating geometry) and this control just isn't found in the "easy to use" rendering/animation packages.  Give the Visualize user a SW feature tree with its selection and grouping (assemblies, sub assemblies) capabilities, "mating" tools and an OGL shaded with edges "working" view in Visualize that is stable (meaning it doesn't crash often) and they'd have a much better animation tool that is more SW like.

I agree with Alan that the shadows in Visualize "behave" much better than they do in PV360.  That's a double issue however.  The Foundry has never really provided a great "shadow floor" for its customers and SW has never really opened the controls in PV360 to help deal with the IC issue.  It is nice that Visualize doesn't have to worry about IC and overall that does make for a "cleaner" image/animation in Visualize.

I too have heard that SW animations will transfer into Visualize at some point.  That's when I think CAD people will become serious about using Visualize for animation (and rendering) work.  That's typically what I do now.  Build the animation in SW and transfer to Modo for the materials and processing.  Then I can better control the IC/shadow issues.

From what I have seen the Visualize team at DS is very competent and very serious about making SWV a great product with all the capability users need to create great work.  Factors beyond the team's control may limit what they are able to achieve. I do hope they have success and I support their efforts.

As with most things, time will tell.