Cylindrical – Allows the component to rotate and translate along the same axis.Slider – Allows the component to translate along a single axis.Revolute – Allows the component to rotate around joint origin.Rigid – Locks components together, removing all degrees of freedom.They are detailed here and you can watch videos on how to add them here and here. There are 7 types of joints with various degrees of freedom.

Now that you have different components that make up your model, you can add joints to describe how the different components are constrained between one another. That being said, there's more flexibility and settings if you used Maya/Mental Ray. Fusion 360 is also free (to educators, tinkerers, and startups).

If you've ever rendered something in Maya/Mental Ray on your personal computer, you know that even 50 frames could take a few hours. All because the processing is done on a set of servers somewhere far away. If you have Maya, or even Inventor, there are ways to do it in each respective program, but I've found that Fusion's Cloud Rendering is unique in that it outputs a fairly high quality video (.mp4) of a 100 frames in about 20 minutes. Please keep in mind that this is one of many ways to render an animation.

and then Cloud Render the motion study in the Render tabĪutodesk has put out a nice tutorial on the matter:īut, unfortunately, as of release, there are a few steps you have to do to get to the magical button that will let you Cloud Render a motion study, that the above video does not talk about (because they're essentially bugs).

create a motion study to tell Fusion what values those joints should take as it moves.

create joints to tell the software where the degrees of freedom are.

Model/import/create the thing you want to animate.

So if for example, you have modeled something, and you want animate how it moves, here are the (general) steps you'd take to create a nice looking animation, fully rendered.

More accurately, this Instructable shows you how to render a motion study in Autodesk's Fusion 360 using their very nice and very fast Cloud Rendering.

Rendering fusion 360