Using Opacity property to hide and show actors in SOLIDWORKS Composer Animations

While creating SOLIDWORKS Composer animations everyone uses the collaborative actors such as arrows, 2D text labels, digger views etc., to make animations more interactive and easier to understand. At some point you may want to hide some of these collaborative actors throughout the animation.

NOTE: Hide/show will allow the collaborative actor to be either shown or hidden throughout the video.

Hiding and showing collaborative actors can be controlled using the opacity property. In this SOLIDWORKS Composer animation we can hide and show the 4 screws.

SOLIDWORKS Composer animations

To achieve this follow the steps below:

Step 1:

Screws are exploded from the neutral position to the final exploded position at 2 seconds. Now select all 4 screws using Ctrl or Home tab > select> select instances > click on one of the screws.

Step 2:

Place the timeline bar at 3 seconds and now in the left hand side properties pane > Opacity bar is already at maximum, which means the screws are shown. Drag the bar from maximum to minimum and back to maximum and release the cursor > this will capture the maximum opacity property at 3 seconds.

Note: Do not click outside the viewport as this will deselect the screws.

Step 3:

While the screws are still selected > place the timeline bar at 4 seconds > In properties pane drag the opacity bar to minimum > this will hide the screws at 4 seconds.

The reason I captured the maximum opacity (screws shown) property at 3 seconds is because now the screws will slowly start hiding from 3 seconds to 4 seconds.

If I wouldn’t have captured the maximum opacity property at 3 seconds the screws would have started faded slowly from 0 seconds to 4 seconds

Step 4:

Now place timeline bar at 5 seconds and show the screws by capturing the maximum opacity property or copy the opacity property holding Ctrl+drag and drop from 3 seconds to 5 seconds. Doing so the screws will be shown at 5 seconds.

Opacity property is captured automatically when we drag the bar because auto-keys is toggled on by default on timeline toolbar.

The same result could also have been achieved using the Effects > Fade in and fade out tools on the timeline toolbar.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS Composer Animations

To learn more attend our SOLIDWORKS Composer Essentials training course either in a Canadian classroom near you or Live Online.