About the Animation Library

Composer uses key-frame based animation, which lets you build animations by arranging actors and taking snapshots at moments in time, called key frames. A set of pre-defined, generic animations is provided with Composer to let you create simple animations quickly, via the Animation Library workshop. Users proficient in XML can create their own custom animations.

The following topics are discussed:

See Also
Animation Library Workshop
Creating Pre-defined Animations

The Animation Library

Your animation library is made up of pre-defined and custom animations.

By default, custom animations are available in C:\Users\[your_user_name]\Documents\SOLIDWORKSComposer\User\AnimationLibrary. You can change the default location by specifying another folder in Application Preferences > Data Paths, under Composer Files > Animation Library.

Tip: In larger companies, documentation teams can keep their animation library on a server and redirect individual users to this library through the Data Paths mechanism.

Animation Groups, Animations and Motions

You need to understand how animations are organized on your computer, and how this relates to what you see in the Animation Library workshop in Composer.

Animations are organized in groups. Each group corresponds to a sub-folder in the AnimationLibrary folder. There are two groups for pre-defined animations, Highlight and Motion. Consequently, your AnimationLibrary folder contains two sub-folders, Highlight and Motion. You can add sub-folders as required to create custom animation groups.

Each group/sub-folder contains a set of XML files. Each XML file corresponds to an animation. For example, the Highlight animation folder contains a file called Enhance.xml. This file corresponds to the Enhance pre-defined animation, available in the Highlight group of the Animation Library workshop.

Animations themselves are made up of a number of motions. For example, the Enhance animation contains the following motions: Flash and Scale. In the Animation Library workshop, the motions available for the selected animation are listed, and you can customize the properties of each motion.

Pre-defined Animations

Composer is delivered with a set of generic animations that are pre-defined via XML files.

You can customize these pre-defined animations through their properties, in the Animation Library workshop. See Properties.

Pre-defined Animation Group Pre-defined Animations Available
Highlight
  • Enhance
  • Focus
  • Validated
  • Warning
Motion
  • Install
  • Remove
  • Roll
  • Screw
  • Unscrew
  • Untighten

Custom Animations

You can consider creating your own custom animation groups and animations, provided that you are proficient in XML.

Tip: In larger companies, this task could be devoted to a documentation architect.

When creating custom animations, make sure you create them in the AnimationLibrary folder, and store them in sub-folder as required. This will ensure that they are listed alongside pre-defined animations in the Animations Library workshop.

For an example of XML code created for a custom animation, see Custom Animation XML Example.