Animating Light

Yes, check it out. All you need is this bad-ass M.F....

That's short for Macro Feature of course!

*) Open the assembly *) Drag the light fixture shade a little bit *) Hit CTRL-Q

You will see the spot light re-direct itself accordingly. It's not "real time" unfortunately, but it's good enough for animations.

You can edit the Macro Feature to do many lights as well as different kinds.

Here is a sample anime...

Mike Wilson

Mike:

How do I edit the macro feature?

Jacob

for that matter how do i insert a macro feature into my assy?

In the original ZIP file you downloaded from my site, there is a regular macro file. This is what you edit. The Macro Feature in the assembly references this file.

When you edit the macro, there are some brief instructions to get you started.

Mike Wilson

Well, if the macro is written properly, all you need to do is run it and it will insert the Macro Feature, 'feature' into the Feature Manager.

Since I'm not a macro expert, it took me many hours of trial and error as well as help from this NG to get it working.

I haven't tested it in 2004, so there may be some glitches there. I just tried to run it and got an error. Probably a minor fix.

Mike Wilson

i'm trying it in 2004 and get an error at the line: "Set Doc = swApp.ActiveDoc"

Hmm, not sure what's going on. For now you can remove the line "Option Explicit" and re-save the macro. This should allow you to run it.

I won't have the time to de-bug it for the time being. Maybe one of our API Superheroes can help? Like I mentioned, my macros skills are pretty rusty so any advice, new additions, improvements would be warmly welcomed.

Maybe you can start a new API thread to help get you the features you need in your animation macro? That way you can grab the attention of the API people (they might ignore this thread).

Mike Wilson

Thanks Mike.