Since smartart is a collection of shapes that is grouped, it can be quite challenging to animate a smartart in a way that you want. PowerPoint out of box allows you limited flexibility in the way you can animate sub parts of a smart art.
Let us assume the following smart art
Say if I want to animate this so that the first Level 1 appears, then the equivalent Level 2 appears and so on.
But the default animation options will give you the following:
Default Animation available with Smart Art
This obviously does not fit into our flow. So instead of using the Level based animation, we can do the one-by-one animation and then customize the animation further to fit our need. The below video shows the customization that will allow us to animate the smartart as per our requirement.
Customized Animation
Comments