Dear all,
I have a conveyor belt that I would like to animate and perhaps put on some products. The product animation will be easy, but how about animating the rotation/looping of the belt? It consists of many little belt joints (see image). Is it even possible to do? What would be your take on it?
I have also attached a link to the 3D model of belts, so that it could be easier for you guys to play around.
Note that the link expires on 09/03/2023 at 23:59.
I think in KeyShot it’s not really possible to do such an animation. But lots of modelling software can I think and then the only thing needed would be an export to an alembic file (.abc) which Sketchup will import including all keyframes. I think it’s easiest if you just export the belt and the things that drive them into some software to create the animation.
Not sure which software you used for the model but it might have also those capabilities this is f.e. a little tutorial I found for blender: Blender 2.8 Dynamic Conveyor Belt 10 Min Tutorial EASY - YouTube
It would be nice to stick to one rendering software to work with, since we are willing to get that realistic look that KeyShot can provide.
I’m thinking out loud now, but would it be possible to use Keyframe feature? The only issue I think we might face is that there are a lot of those little belt parts, so that would be a mess to apply it to every single one of them.
But for the rendering you can just use KeyShot, it’s more that KeyShot is a great renderer but the animation options are quite limited.
If you have a lot of time you could do it with the keyframe animation I think. But for example Blender or MODO etc, basically they repeat that small part over a spline/outline and basically you only need to say how much that spline and its parts should move and it will calculate how much every separate piece should move.
I don’t know blender but looking at that tutorial you can fix it pretty fast, guess blender also exports animations as alembic. In the end those are also all separate keyframes.
If you would do it in KeyShot with keyframes you need to animate every single part of the belt. And it should move exactly same amount over x in every frame also it will collide with another part of the belt. So if you make one error somewhere it’s hard to fix without starting over.
I would really try to copy one of the belt parts in Blender. Than you only need to draw some spline and basically all the other things like copy/paste and motion is calculated by Blender. I’m not a real Blender fan but it’s free and the tutorial looked real simple.
In the end it will all be in KeyShot as keyframes anyway, like you also have after a physics calculation. It’s just the process to animate this manually using keyframes would be a nightmare imo 
Ahh, okay, so you are suggesting that I would need to do the animation part in Blender, then export it as .abc and then import it into KeyShot for the final rendering of the animation?
If it is possible, it would be amazing!
I will try that one out, thank you @oscar.rottink!
Yes! And the Alembic (.abc) file will contain everything, the geometry, animation and other things. That’s why I think it’s most easy to only do the belt in blender. Keeps the Blender scene clean and after import you can just remove the static belt you already had in KeyShot.
The round parts that rotate by the belt you can just do with a KeyShot rotation animation.
I only played a little bit importing such animations but it worked really well. If I’ve some time I’ll try what happens if I try to do the same using MODO (just because I do most modelling in Modo). Good for me to learn a bit as well. Animations tot test things are only fun to create with a nice GPU so you don’t need to wait days 
Blender can export BIPs to KeyShot via the Plug-in.
KeyShot can import FBX with animation.
As animation you only need a tiny step. Every row has to move to the location of the direct near by row. In a loop it looks like a full animation. But it’s not very handy to duplicate the animations.
Just my two cents
I was curious to see the final result, if you did, please send it here!
Thanks for the tips, I will try to come up with something. 
Great, Oscar, thanks for the tips!
Defiantly! I will be happy to share the outcome if we get there at any point. 
