Getting Started Creating ANIMATIONS in Fusion 360 - Beginners Start Here!

In today’s video, we’re going to start talking about the animation tools inside of Autodesk Fusion 360 and how to use them to generate moving animations!

To start off, this is an FBX model I downloaded from Turbosquid for free and imported. I will link to it in the notes below, but there was a bit of re-work involved for this application.

TURBOSQUID HELICOPTER MODEL

It’s not ideal, but it will work for this application. One thing to note is that I needed to take the rotor geometry and put it into its own component for this animation to work as the rotors need to animate independently from the rest of the model.

To start off, we’re going to want to change to the animation workspace. This workspace contains a different toolset than the design workspace, which is more focused on helping you create animations.

Intro to the Animation workspace –
- Top bar contains tools
- Left bar contains your browser
- Workspace is where you see your model
- Animation timeline is where you’re going to control your various animation elements

Now let’s create a simple animation. We’re going to start by adding a new transformation at the top of the page. It’s going to ask us to select a component to transform (or move). Let’s select the rotor head that I’ve created.

We can apply a rotation to this rotor, but you’re going to notice that it doesn’t do anything if you select ok. This is because we haven’t set a time for the animation inside of the timeline. What we want to do is start by dragging the little indicator on the timeline to a time associated with the length of the clip we want to create. In this case, for example, I’m going to set it to 4 seconds, which will create a 4 second long animation.

Now if you add your transformation, it will animate this transformation over 4 seconds and add a little clip on your timeline. You can right click on this clip and adjust the duration, edit the action itself, and more.

Add another transformation with the clip set with the end to be at 12 seconds and set our rotation to a larger number, like 4320. This would be 12 rotations over 8 seconds.

Finally, let’s add a movement. Select your whole helicopter as the transform object this time, and set a movement where your helicopter flies off the screen.

Notice you can also set your camera at different points in time by selecting those points on the timeline, then moving your camera to the location you’d like.

Finally, you can export your animation to a video file by clicking on publish.

[TheFusionEssentials]

Hi everyone! Let me know what kind of animation tutorials you'd like to see for Fusion 360 in the comments below! :)

[dprintwiz]

The shadow is trippy though. Still for an Engineering CAD software, it's amazing it can do that.

[karlz_thrasher]

This was incredibly straightforward... Thank you for this tutorial! I remember I felt confused about the subject and used to procrastinate, but after following your tutorial with my model. I think I can do more. Thank you once more

[yasmeenxx]

This was really helpful, i am working on my graduation project and I was completely lost, thank yous so much

[EntertheRift-ctms]

Great video man this was a really solid intro into the basics. Fusion can sometimes be tricky because there will be a couple key things that can make or brake a project creation and this defiantly helped with jumpstarting animation creation.

[douglasmckinley-sr]

Thanks. Motivates me to try it. Suggestion- put the video at the beginning to get more people interested in spending 12 minutes of their life with you.

[jimstana]

Very helpful. As a newcomer, one issue I have had is that the screen in AVI seems to be cutoff from the screen in Animation? Not sure why. Your explanation of camera view is very helpful and may be part of my issue.

[lepalakatamahlatsemongalo]

Great detailed explanation
. Straight to the point. Thank you.

[josiahrodriguez]

This was incredibly helpful, thank you for making this video! I like the way you make your videos, its very easy to learn from them.

[xavviermendoza]

Holy crap! Awesome video! Very helpful!

[kapimataio]

I love this video bro, now how do I get rid of the shadow?

[demitridecastro]

Can you share a tutorial on how you built that Black Hawk Helicopter?

[SADYT-beqe]

Thank u for the basics! It was really helpful, i knew u could do animation in fusion but didn't know the basics hahaha

[noordinasimi]

Thank you for such a great and easy to follow video on Fusion 360 animation. However, the tricky part was not explained, would appreciate if you could show how to set the centre of rotation to be on the rotor head please

[gigilam]

Thanks a lot~ it’s nice!
This is really helpful

[metamuhamudnoah]

oh wooow this wonderfull
it is very usefull to me as a beginner please do more up to datails please.

[leonyegenoglu]

Thanks a lot for this tutorial! Clear explanation and to the point!

[metamuhamudnoah]

oh that is great but the shadow flys with the copter too it looks like just the camera moving but not the chopper flying
can show us how to separate the shadow from the model

[ambitiousglue]

Can you please make a tutorial video on how you modelled this helicopter design?

[Ghufhf]

Hello, how would you render the animation? Would you require another software?