I have recently been evaluating various plugins for
animations. I was surprised to realize how often we interior designers need these.
That is why today I bring you two short videos: an aquarium and a kitchen
cabinet. The list of mobile elements can be extended to a wide variety of settings and include such things as retractable lamps, furniture like a sofa bed, staging, ceilings, vertical partitions, sliding roofs and even shop windows.
The plugins I evaluated are Proper Animation (free), Su Animation and Keyframe. The one that offers the most functions is Keyframe, and it is the one I used for my tests and to write this article. The plugin
is not free, but it’s available on a 10-day trial. It can
translate, rotate and scale an object, animate subgroups/subcomponents, assign Keyframe transition times and export to a Movie.
The plugin can be downloaded from http://regularpolygon.org/keyframe-animation/
where you can also find easy-to-follow tutorials.
As an example, for the aquarium I used a project I did a long time ago for a seafood restaurant. Unfortunately the project was never built but it helped me in this case to study various possibilities for fish
movements. The end result still needs some polishing, but it is far enough along to demonstrate its scope and illustrate a combination of translations and rotations. The user need only to generate different groups and then record the initial, the in-between and the final positions.
In this example the fish only rotate around a center.
In this example the cabinet has a combination of rotations and translations to show the Lazy Susan and drawer.
