This is a followup to an earlier post on drawing and animating gears. You might want to review that post before reading this one.
A reader asked me how to make the gears appear one by one while the gears turned. Another suggestion was to use the gears to suggest a group working effectively together – “meshing.” This post will address both ideas.
Here’s a video of equally sized gears that appear sequentially:
The animation is straightforward: the first gear turns one revolution and the second gear appears (Fade) while both turn a revolution. This is followed by the the appearance of the third gear. Here’s what the animation pane looks like; the Spin of the second and third gear is With their Fade entry:
The process is the same for other gear trains designed according to the process outlined in the earlier post. As long as the first gear executes a single rotation and the rotations and relative sizes are set up to keep the gears meshed, there shouldn’t be a problem. Here’s an example using a design with three different gears from that post:
Here’re the relationships between rotations and gear “size” for this animation:
Here is the animation pane:
Here’s an animation using a gear motif to suggest cooperation or synchronization of three organizations:
The video is not as smooth as the PowerPoint animation.
The three gears in the first animation in this post were modified for this animation. If you ungroup the gears to make the modifications; you will lose the animation, even when you regroup. If you keep the gear objects grouped during the modifications, the animation will be preserved. Here’re some notes.
- Select the gear object and select the Donut shape that forms the interior of the gear:
- Under Drawing Tools, use Change Shape to change the Donut to a circle (Oval).
- Crop/resize a face image to the size of the circle and Copy it (placing it on the clipboard).
- Re-select the circle and use Fill/Texture or Picture/Clipboard to fill the circle with the face image. Add a 6 pt outline to the circle.
- If you’ve done this right, the animation effects for the gear object will still exist.
- Repeat for the other gears.
The text legends use the Transform/Follow Path/Arch Up text effect, centered on the corresponding gear. Add a entry Fade animation to the text With the gear appearances to complete the animation.
If you would like a free copy of a PowerPoint file with these animations, please use the link below and click on the PowerPoint icon to download a “source” PowerPoint file:
See this page for more on downloading files.
If you have questions, praise or complaints, please add a comment below. If you appreciate my efforts, liking or following this blog might be a good idea.
powerpointy 
3 Responses to “More Animating Gears in PowerPoint”