Hello and welcome to another CAD clip on AutoCAD 2007 3D. In this lesson, we are talking about the motion picture animation stuff which is really exciting and we can see lots of use for that right away and so we will go in there by clicking on our view menu here and going down to motion picture animations and you can see there is dots after it which means a dialogue box is going to come up and inside of there, we can specify really you can see there is the camera information. There is the target information, animation settings, frame duration etc.

The first thing I usually do is bump this up to be about 30 seconds and then you will see that this one adapts number of frames base on frame rates per second and if you know a little bit about video, you can start to play with these numbers.

The main thing is I am going to go camera, link camera to I can either give a point with a moving target or I can have a moving camera with static target or a moving target or moving path or we can say none. So we can play with basically as we create this animation, there is the camera and there is the target and how they are going to behave.

So I am going to say link camera to the path, pick point I am just going to pick that circle and I am going to hit okay. Then I am going to say target link, link to target to point and hit okay and I am just going to say pick a point here and then pick a point just in the middle and hit okay and then after I do that I am going to do my path again because it lost that information.

We get a name and we can record this and use them and then we can do a preview and it is going to show us a preview with that. Now that it did not look like I saw it very much so let us hit cancel on that and let us do target point again and use pick point and I am going to make sure I snap to something like that. Then I am going to do a preview and goes by really fast and that is because this got reset so I am going to reset that back to make it a 30 second video preview and you can see the camera over just like at the racetrack the camera moving along and showing us all that information and it just so happen that I am using a circle as my camera point and then I can hit escape anytime and then if I hit okay I can save that as a WMV file is how all my videos are made and then you can also, I think that your only option I was thinking, you could save as an AVI but in this animation, it is only WMV.

When we do our fly and walk lessons later when we record, we do have a different choice so I can go in there and save that and then I can save that file and it is going to create that file for me and you have to be careful because of course some of these files end up being really big. So I can go through that process and then now we just kind of skipped ahead here, almost that are 900 frames and then after that is done, we can take that file and send it out to a client or use it for whatever purposes we want it to do to create that animation for but the thing is it is a file now and it is on our hard drive or we can put it on the network or wherever we want and use that animation file.

The other thing you should notice is that I should note shift middle mouse button is, notice where that circle, it is not sitting flat on the ground right because otherwise it will end up being, your camera view needs to get up a little bit.

So I am just going to go back to my top view. You can also use a poly line. I am just going to type PL and draw a poly line. I could make this go wherever I want around, I am going erase a circle and now I am going to go my front my view and I am going to take that poly line and I am going to say move and I am going to move that up a little bit.

Go back to my 3D view and now I can go back to my view and motion picture and I am going to say link camera to path and pick on this object hit okay and then I am going to say target is also a path which is the same object hit okay and then do a preview and then I am going to through and you are going see the camera kind of follow along there okay as you please. I am just going to hit cancel on that, maybe I will make that a 10 second video instead, do a preview, it is going to go through of all around there and of course we have our different display types that we can view this in current view or 3D wire frame or realistic view whatever we want inside of that preview and then if we hit okay then we can save that out as its own file etc. okay.

So if we have that and I would just say it is a matter of just going in and playing with some of these settings and targets and paths and stuff like that. Different people have different applications for creating these animated motion pictures.

And one last thing inside of here I wanted just to look at you, you can reverse this if you want and it will reverse so the camera will go backwards and then we have corner deceleration which means that as it goes around the corner, it will decelerate nominally so that it does not make it so sharp. So some extra couple settings and of course we can pick our resolution off of there and there we can look we can change our AVI, MPEG and WMV formats and then we have our display that we can put in there as well.