SOLIDWORKS 2022 What’s New – SOLIDWORKS Visualize Animations

It’s been a few years coming for SOLIDWORKS Visualize to get some major new enhancements and 2022 delivered! Particularly, animations in SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2022 got a massive overhaul. New organization methods, keyframes, cameras, and motion studies all see benefits in the new release.

Multiple Animations

Let’s first look at one of my favorite enhancements that may seem small but is huge! Historically a SOLIDWORKS Visualize project could only have one animation, but not anymore! In SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2022 you can have multiple animations within the same project!

Multiple Animations

This is huge. One SOLIDWORKS Visualize project, as many animations as you want, and you can switch between them. No more creating multiple projects for multiple animations. Users will have fewer files to manage.

Animation List

The next big change is the new animation list. Here you’ll see a whole new suite of tools to help manage animations.

New Animation List for Managing Animations

Animation List Details

Here’s what each section does:
Add – Create groups of animations or camera sequences.
Change View – Switches between a large list and a small list of animations on the timeline.
Search – Allows you to search for and filter your list of animated objects by text.
Change Sort Mode – Allows you to filter what Animated Object Types are shown.

Animated Object Types? What’s that you ask? It’s another handy enhancement to the animation timeline and if you’re like me, you may have created animations in the past with parts, groups, appearances, and cameras only to find a long list of ‘Names’ that may or may not (usually not) make any sense for what was what. Animated Object Types is great to help clear this up. One simple icon and you can see what that ‘name’ you animated is!

Animated Object Types

Animation Keyframes

SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2022 gets a few nice enhancements for managing keyframes. These are nice little enhancements, but not huge in my book. One is the ability to suppress and unsupress keys along the timeline. This can certainly be handy in some workflows where we’d historically delete the key and then use ‘Undo’ to bring it back later. The ‘Suppress’ and ‘Unsupress’ is a much more robust method.

Suppress Animation Keyframes

Also, for clean uniformity within animation transitions, the Keyframe Properties dialog includes numerical values for Tension and Motion Ease. Instead of changing a slider to be roughly a value, you have much more control of the amount.

Animation Keyframe Properties Dialog

And lastly, if you want to really stick to uniformity with animations, you can now copy the keyframe properties from one key and paste them on others!

Copy & Paste Animation Keyframe Settings

Conclusion

SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2022 delivered in a big way with regards to the enhancements for Animations. With the ability to leverage multiple animations along with the additional organizational and standardization tools and techniques for animations. SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional users who create animations should be rushing to upgrade to 2022.

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2022. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Brandon Nelms
Application Engineer Manager
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your next event.