Animating the Professor's Invention in MODO (Part 2)

Having started to explore the animation tools in MODO I wondered if I could actually animate some of the elements of the model itself?  Animation in MODO is based around a reasonably standard timeline/key-frame analogy and after some hit and miss attempts to get elements to rotate I finally figured out how to set key-frames at the start and end of the sequence and modify the rotational properties of the elements.  All the objects that I selected initially seemed to have their centre points correctly placed which was a big help.   I added a couple of keyframes to the camera to ping/pong the camera during the sequence.   I had to remove the ice-cream lolly pedals from the small gears on the left - as I would have had to build a hierarchy of elements to rotate these pedals correctly and I wasn't able to animate the belts, that would have been seriously complex, but with all the wheels rotating there is "perception" that the belts seem to be driving them and I felt the result was reasonable for a first attempt.

Animating the Professor's Invention in MODO (Part 1)

I've been starting to experiment with animation in MODO.  As MODO provides a full modelling and animation system, in addition to simply rendering LDRAW models I wanted to see what the options were for animating digital Lego models using MODO.  My first attempt was a relatively simply turnaround of my "Professor's Invention For Peeling Potatoes" model that I'd added to Lego Ideas.

Modo supports both Orbiting Camera and Spinning Geometry but whenever I've tried to use spinning geometry many of the Lego elements seem to disappear (and this seems irrespective of the LDRAW model you import) - it's possible that I'm misunderstanding something about the spinning geometry settings so at the moment my only option seems to be Orbiting Camera. 

It's important to remember to set the camera target though as otherwise the camera orbit can seem very odd.  You can use the "Set Target" option in Camera properties to fix the camera on part of the model as it rotates so that the camera view remains locked on the part of the model during the rotation.

This is fairly easy way to create a rendered turnaround of an LDRAW model using MODO.