- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sat Sep 25, 2021 1:44 am
- Real Name: Nicky Barkla
Sure, animating the Grid Warp mesh is easy to do - but a bit hidden for new users.
With the Grid Warp selected, look at the bottom of the Inspector for "Right-click here for mesh animation":
Right-clicking where it says to will bring up the same menu you'd get when you right-click on any other control. That's where you can attach Modifiers, for example (you may not have learned about those yet). You could select Animate from that right-click menu to turn on keyframing.
In this example, you don't even need to right-click: if you click the little keyframe diamond next to "Right-click here for mesh animation" that will do the same thing as right-click -> Animate: it will enable keyframing, and also drop a keyframe on the current frame saving the current state of the mesh.
So:
- Set up the start position for your grid (or maybe that's just the default grid)
- Go to the frame on which you want the animation to start
- Click the diamond next to "Right-click for.."
- Go to the frame on which the animation should end
- Adjust the mesh in the Viewer, which will automatically add another keyframe representing this new mesh state. You can also click the diamond again to manually set a keyframe on any frame without changing the mesh, for example when you want the mask to stay static between a range of frames.
Once a control is animated, any adjustments will automatically drop a keyframe on the active frame, and Fusion will animate between those keyframes. In the Grid Warp example, that means any time you change the mesh after you've clicked the keyframe diamond (or chosen right-click -> Animate), a keyframe is added on the active frame.
You can later see and manipulate the timing of those keyframes in the Spline Editor.
PS. The "Right-click here for ... animation" control appears on a few nodes. For example, the Polygon node. The difference with the Polygon is that the Polygon is keyframed by default - so changing the polygon mask on separate frames animates by default. If you wanted the polygon not to animate, you could right-click where it says to, and choose "Remove PolygonXPolyLine" and that would remove any keyframes and stop it animating.