Animation in AutoCAD

[GMWindow]

I am working on some assembly drawings for our production floor, and I was also going to try and integrate some of the 3D drawings into our company website. I want to animate one of the door slabs to open when you enter the site. Is this possible to do through CAD or does it require another program?

Thanks for the help,
GMWindow

 

[John2004]

You can try

http://www.blender.org

for a great freeware animation program. They also have an swf pugin you can use to make flash animations for websites. This program can produce animations that look like they were done with 3D studio max.

There is also a program called "swift 3D" that can make flash animations.

If you want to keep it simple, you can just do a gif animation with a freeware program.

John

 

[GMWindow]

I can't integrate .dwg files or .dxf into Blender, what should I do or what should I change?

GMWindow

 

[John2004]

I think you have to export the CAD file as a VRML file, then import the VRML into blender. Here is a link that explains importing cad files into Blender for rendering, but once you get the files into Blender, you can animate.

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Import_and_Render_a_SolidWorks_Model

If you go the following site and look under "graphics and imaging", they have alot of freeware animation and CAD related programs. There is also an animation program called openFX that you may want to check into. I think it may handle CAD files direct.

http://www.freewr.com/

Hope this helps.
John

 

[John2004]

I just recently imported a 3D solid model AutoCAD assembly into the newest version of Blender (2.42a) as a .3ds 3D studio file and it worked fine. A DXF file would not import properly, but the .3ds file imported into Blender 2.42a with no problems.

I just thought I would pass this along in case it can help anyone.

John