This tutorial is for anyone who doesn’t have much knowledge in Swift 3d, or is not sure how to animate in swift 3d. We won’t be modeling anything to spectacular for the animation, just a bunch of boxes resembling a person.

1. Start off by opening Swift 3d and make a box.

2. Make 2 more boxes, the upper arm and the forearm.

NOTE: When you resize your arm, make sure you do it in the advanced modeler, otherwise when we get to the animation part you will run into some difficulties. Skip steps 3 & 4 if you already know how to do this.

3. Enter the advanced modeler by clicking on the tab up the top (Make sure the box you want to resize is selected before you do this). Click the Edit Mesh button on the right hand side of the tool bar (It should turn red once you have done this).

4. Click the uniform scale button and then adjust the size of your box. Once it is the correct size return back to the Scene Editor by clicking the tab.

5. Select the Upper arm and Forearm. Copy (Ctrl+c) and Paste (Ctrl+v) them and move them over to the other side of the body for the other arm. Now select the body and click ‘Object’ over on the left. Name it ‘body’.

Repeat this for the remaining body parts (left upper arm, left lower arm etc…).

6. Look up at the Hierarchy window, it should be to the right of the timeline. It should list all the things on the stage. Drag the left upper arm onto the body in the Hierarchy window. It should know look like below.

The left upper arm is now attached to the body. Now, if you move the body the left upper arm will move too. This makes it alot easier to animate, since it will move together with the body and make the animation look more realistic and save some time animating it.

7. Select the left upper arm and click on position on the left of the screen. Click on the box saying ‘Move Pivot Only’. Drag the pivot point up to where your shoulder would be. This is where the left upper arm will rotate from.

Do this for the rest of the body.

8. Do this with the rest of the items in the hierarchy window until it looks something like mine:

Now we have our model set up like a human body it is time to animate.

9. Click the animate button on the right hand side of the tool bar. Now Swift 3d is in animating mode. Click on the upper left arm and select frame 15 on your timeline.

10. In the crystal keyball down in the bottom left of the screen, click the box that should say 0° and change it to 10. This means when we rotate the arm it will rotate 10° at a time. Now click the box above it, which is a black ball with a curved red line on the bottom of it. This locks the trackball to spin rotation, so the arm only rotates the direction we want it. Click on the trackball and drag your mouse. Now swift will fill in the other frames, just like flash does with a tween. If you continue doing this you will end up with something like below: