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GDGerald Davis26/01/2015

I have some experience using Solidworks. I've just started using Composer and my CAD UI habit is getting in the way of performing simple tasks.  I'm hoping a Composer expert can guide me towards a better workflow.

I'm generating an animation of a mechanism self-assembling in the traditional fade-in, move-to-destination, pan to better view, and repeat. The animation has more than 20 camera keys. I want to change the background image path property in all of the keys.

I am not satisfied with the explode tools in composer and have opted to manually create the sequence as I would in Solidworks. (I explode the components in the correct sequence so that the Motion Study Wizard creates the motion keys for me and all I have to do is control visibility (aka opacity if you're 3Dvia-ish).

I'm a newbie and am stupid. I used a mangled combination of set-as-neutral and repeat last property change to set a path for all of my camera keys - I got good at hitting the F4 key. Then I realized the result sucked. Now I want to delete (revert back to no background path) in all camera keys.

I've tried rubber banding around all of the camera keys, hitting RMB, then selecting "Background Image: in the Property Manager for the scene', but that doesn't exist in 3Dvia Composter.

My plan for making the animation:

  1. Ctrl-E to save a view
  2. transform a component(s)
  3. Ctrl-E to save a view
  4. set opacity of compent(s) to 0
  5. repeat steps 1..4 about 26x until all items are exploded and only one component remains visible.
  6. Drag 26 views in reverse order onto timeline *
  7. stretch some time to delay all but 1st camera move until 1st component stops moving. This gives nice fade-in, translate, camera move, etc without too many clicks.
  8. select a camera key and change the background image path.
  9. set as neutral property
  10. repeat steps 8..9
  11. post on forum for help! there must be a better way!

Note the red items are probably inane workflow. I suspect that "style" is maybe it. I probably need to relearn what views control and those diagonal/split view thumbnail things come from and do.

I tried smashing F1 in Composter 2015 and got a web page blank search screen - no topics or TOC. If I enter a correct search term, I see a list of topics. "Make as SolidWorks" gets no results.

* why isn't there a button on the animation workshop to do steps 1.7 for me?