Animation not working.

Q&A about the latest versions
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cbsmail
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2017 4:38 pm

Hi all,

I've followed the tutorial for using the animation editor and also another tutorial video Martin posted of a reservoir. So I'm pretty sure I'm creating the animation correctly and it works in the editor.

I then check both auto rotate & animation checkboxes under the 'Auto Rotation & Animation' tab but it always just auto rotates. I've even assigned a button to 'start animation' and that just triggers the autorotate. :(

I'm not seeing any errors in the Chrome console and the same behaviour is also seen in Microsoft Edge.

I'm on a Windows 10 pro machine using Pano2VR 5.2.3 pro x64

Help please!!

edit: I've tried it on two PC's now (Win 10 Pro & Home x64), I also tried making a project from scratch just in case and still no joy. :cry:
cbsmail
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2017 4:38 pm

I've now tried uninstalling and installing 5.2.0 x64 and it still doesn't work. I've uninstalled and installed 5.2.3 x32 but still no luck, no matter what I do the animation never plays, it always auto rotates.

I've followed Hopki's directions in the second to last post here and I think I've now exhausted every possible combination under the html5 output "Auto Rotate & Animation" tab.

For example I've tried the seemingly default setting of creating an animation and then checking both auto rotate (setting 3 seconds) and animation. After 3 second timeout it just auto rotates.

I've checked animation and unchecked auto rotate, if I click the auto rotate button (which has default "mouse click > toggle auto rotate" action assigned) and then once the tour has loaded click the auto rotate and it auto rotates.

Client wants an animation to play upon clicking a button, leaving the default timeout auto rotate settings in place but I can't get an animation to play period and am at a loss as to why.
cbsmail
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2017 4:38 pm

So more testing and it seems I've found a caveat. The only way I could get the animation to fire is if the active node has an associated animation clip, otherwise it auto rotates. This obviously reduces user friendliness and or increases the complexity.

My work around (hopefully, yet to be implemented) will be firing an action to move the current view to the first clip in the animation and then start the animation. If this works, and considering not all nodes will have animated clips created, I won't be able to utilise the animation and auto rotate at the same time as the user experience will differ for nodes depending on whether they are included or excluded from the animation.

It would be preferable to be able to create an animation using as many of the nodes as desired. The animation plays from the first clip regardless of what the current view is and either loops indefinitely/user defined and or once played through defaults back to the starting panorama and auto rotates. It would also be great if the transition effect could be individually defined for traversing nodes, animation and auto rotate.

So I'm wondering if this is intended behaviour or a bug? Thanks
cbsmail
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2017 4:38 pm

Still haven't got this working completely and would appreciate assistance please!

What I'm trying to achieve. Pano loads with a splash page, this has a play button, user clicks it, it plays background sound and starts the animation. User can take control if they like, otherwise the animation just loops. If user takes control, animation should not restart unless user clicks play button.

Just to add to the complexity, the splash screen is not part of the virtual tour and is therefore not part of the animation.

So I figure I need to change current node to the first in the animation and then start animation. Seems easy, but....

Adding the start animation action to the play button does nothing. I've narrowed this down to the splash pano not being part of the animation, seems start animation is fired before the pano changes.

If I use start auto rotate instead that introduces a few issues. First, there's a noticeable delay before the animation starts, a couple of seconds and when the animation does start there's a weird jerking movement before the animation plays. I've set the initial view to the same as the animation, so there is no need for it to move. Triggering the animation using start auto rotate also means auto rotate is now active and the time out delay is now in play. Therefore the animation automatically starts without user interaction. Being pragmatic I'll deal with this if I can get rid of the first two issues.

The only way I've found to prevent the jerking movement is to add some javascript to the play button. This script uses setTimeout to wait three seconds, before starting the animation via the pano.startAutorotate() function. The side effect of doing this is that elements that are set "visible=false" whilst "autorotate=true" display briefly when each node loads. Nothing I've tried prevents this.

I hope I'm just making this way more complicated than it need to be.
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