When authoring an overview of a machine's breakdown or assembly, there are a few ways to set up the scene. Today we'll be going over the most efficient way to set up your scene to make the authoring process flow smoothly. This technique will explain how to animate a proper disassembly and reverse the animation to become an assembly. 

Machine Hierarchy Setup - Make sure that your machine parts are assembled in a proper hierarchy and positioned correctly as they are on a fully assembled machine.

Default state - It is important that your default state has the machine fully assembled and all parts in their correct position. Do not disassembly the machine in the default state as this can cause unnecessary effort when going forward.

Step Creation - Begin animating, in one single step, as you would for a disassembly of the machine. If using the "Record" button to animate, be sure to stop/start a new recording for every direction of movement if needed. To save time, multiple parts may be animated at the same time. 

Once the disassembly of your machine is animated and arranged on the timeline in a logical order, right-click the step that the disassembly is on and select "Reverse Step". This will flip the timeline and play the timebars in a reverse order. Now if you play back the animation, your machine will be assembling it's self rather than the disassembly we animated. 

Be sure to watch through the entire animation to double check that the parts are being animated properly. Some parts may appear off axis from their original animation. This may be because they are animated in local space and their rotation was changed during the animation. In some instances this can be solved by changing the animation space from "Local" to "World".