We then select the node which contains the parameter to be animated, in this case 'littlefinger'.

If, for example, we want to animate the 'rotation' parameter we click on the square box next to 'rotation' as shown above.

When we click on this we get the following dialog box which gives information about the parameter, in this case a 'SFRotation' parameter, but other types such as 'SFVec3f', 'SFColor', etc. can also be animated.

We click on 'Animate' which brings up a further dialog:

This dialog allows us to specify information about the nodes generated as follows:

• 'Timer Name' - This is the name of the TimeSensor node that will generate the events. It can be left with its default name of 'mainTimer' or changed, if a TimeSensor with this name already exists it will be used instead of generating a new one. If we are animating several parameters we can use the same TimeSensor provided that all the animations have the same time period, if not we can use a different TimeSensor.
• 'Interpolator Name' - The default name for the interpolator is the same as the name of the node containing the parameter but with 'interp_' appended to the front. Again the name of an existing interpolator can be used, however this is only appropriate if the existing parameter and this parameter are of the same type and move exactly in sequence and by the same amount.
• 'This Name' - This is the name of the node containing the parameter being animated, in this case 'littlefinger'. Changing this will cause the node to be renamed which may have effects on other aspects of the model. If the node did not originally have a name it will get a default value something like 'tg_0_1' in this case it is best to give it a more meaningful name.
• 'Steps in animation' - This will set the array size in the interpolator, in other words, the number of steps in the animation. The default is 8 but any value above say 4 would be OK, a higher number will give a smoother animation.

When we are happy with the values set we can press OK to generate the nodes specified.

As you can see in the screenshot above this will generate upto four nodes:

• TimeSensor
• Interpolator
• a route from TimeSensor to Interpolator
• a route from Interpolator to node/parameter being animated.

To animate the movement click on the 'edit' button next to 'keyValue', this will display a table as shown:

The default values in the diagram shows all values have x=0, y=0 and z =1, this means that the rotation will be around the z axis, edit the values to change the rotation. For other interpolators such as vector3d or color use appropriate values.

Click on the green 'play' button to see the animation.