Bongo

Rhinoceros® Tutorial

Bongo Tutorial
There are three main tools you have to access and manage animations: • The Bongo Menu • The Timeline • The Animation Manager

Bongo menu
The first tool is the Bongo menu. When Bongo is loaded you will see a Bongo menu added to the Rhino menu bar.

This menu you can use to activate other parts of Bongo and access animation specific command.

TimelineThe second tool that you will want to become familiar with is the timeline. The timeline controls the timing of the animation and lets you coordinate movement during an animation. The Transformation Slider, located in the lower half of the timeline is the tool you use to rotate and scale objects during animations. This short tutorial will focus mainly on the Timeline and Transformation Sliders.Timeline. To activate the Timeline From the Bongo menu, select Timeline.

Copyright © 2003 Robert McNeel & Associates. All rights reserved.

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Rhinoceros® Tutorial Animation Manager
The third tool is the Animation Manager. The Animation Manager is a view of the relationship between the objects you are animating. As your animations get more sophisticated, you will use this control toadd relationships between object that will make controlling animations much more efficient.

Hierarchy window. To activate the Animation Manager From the Bongo menu, select Animation Manager.

Moving and Rotating Objects
The first animation we will make is the assembly of a flashlight. To see the animation we are trying to create, open the file Flashlight.avi. The flashlight starts in theclosed position. Exploding the lens assembly and moving the batteries out of the light are animated. To create the animation 1 2 Open the model Flashlight start.3dm. From the Bongo menu, select Timeline. The timeline measures time in the number of frames. The gauge and the numbers along the timeline represent the number of frames in the animation. By default Bongo will use 100 frames. The TimelineSlider above the timeline controls the current time in the animation that you are working on. The first part of the flashlight we will animate is the lens cap. 3 4 Click the Animate button. The timeline will turn red. Set the Timeline Slider to frame 50.

Copyright © 2003 Robert McNeel & Associates. All rights reserved.

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Rhinoceros® Tutorial
5 Drag the lens and the lens cap to theright. This tells the animation that at frame 50 you will want the lens to be at that point. Bongo will fill in from frame 0 to 50 how much the lens needs to move to get to that point. 6 Click the Timeline Slider and drag it back and forth along the timeline. This is called scrubbing. The lens cap will slide back and forth with the timeline. Now, that the lens cap is moving, let’s also move thebatteries out. Since in the animation the lens moves first, then the batteries, the batteries will move later in time than the lens cap movement. 7 8 9 Put the Timeline Slider at 100. Drag the batteries to the right to their final location. Scrub the Timeline Slider back and forth. You will notice that the batteries start to move immediately on frame 0 – we want them to start moving on frame 50.

10Select the batteries. 11 Drag the red Keyframe Marker at frame 0 to frame 50 (a small ‘+’ will appear to indicate you are copying the keyframe) Now you should see the lens cap move, then the batteries. The final part of this animation is to get the lens cap to rotate onto the flashlight body. To rotate the lens cap 1 2 3 Slide the Timeline Slider until the lens is almost touching the flashlightbody. You can adjust the view to help you see better. Once at that frame, click the Rotate button to the left of the Transformation Slider. Make sure the X-rotation axis is selected and slide the Transformation Slider all the way to the right. When you scrub the Timeline Slider back and forth now, you should see the complete animation.

Tools to create and control animation

Transformations...