COG animation in Inventor 1

[mookie2836]

I am playing around with Inventor in my drafting class at school, and I was trying to animate gravity (so say if I dropped a die into a box it would roll, like normal gravity would act upon it, until it would stop).

Does anyone know how to do this?

Another example I was trying to set up with COG was that I made a snowglobe, and I was trying to make it so that the snowflakes inside of it would fly around and settle when you moved it around, just like a regular snowglobe would.

Thanks

 

[oliebol]

I think you should use a combination of Inventor and 3D-Studio.


Use inventor for setting up the models including parametric dimensions. then use 3D-Studio for some kind of animation.




Unigraphics NX4,NX3,NX2,R17
Inventor 10,9,8,7
Solid Edge 10,9,8
Solid Works 2000,98
Mechanical Desktop 4,3
Autocad 2004DX,2000,R14, R12
Teamcenter 9

 

[mookie2836]

Does 3D-studio come with the inventor software? I will check tomorrow to see if it is up there.

Many thanks though, I will look into it.

 

[Ratso]

If you have Inventor 11 with simulation then you can add gravity into the assembly, give weight to the components by specifying materials in the parts. Setting up the environment correctly will give you the effect with the rolling ball - it will even bounce when it hits the wall. The snowflake thing is better done - both the modelling part and the animation part - in 3D Max or Alias, both Autodesk products. 3D Max was used in various animation movies like Shrek and can do the "chaos" thing quite well.

Ratso
AutoCAD and Inventor

 

[aardvarkdw]

Mookie,

Inventor really isn't meant to be a CG type program. It has very limited animation capabilites and almost no real world physics capabilites. I don't know about the new fetures in IV11 that Ratso suggested as I haven't used IV11 but I imagine if you intend to do some simulation type work you will want to import your models into some other program like Martin (oliebol) suggested. If you have access to another CAD program, like CATIA v5, I know it does a better job with the physics stuff but I think your hopes of a fully animated model are going to require something other than CAD. This just isn't what it was intended to do.

 

[mookie2836]

Yea, thanks everyone for your input, but other than Martin (oliebol) that aardvarkdw suggested, is there any other program which I could maybe use, like vb (visual basic) or something along those lines which the computers at school may have?

If not, I could take the file home, and download a program which I could do this with.

I am using Inventor 10, our school has not yet upgraded to IV11, but we should be doing it within this semester.

Thanks again to everyone

Class of 2011 NCSU engineers

 

[mookie2836]

Should I just remodle it in a program like 3d max which we have fully installed, and just do it there, set up all the parameters and the cg, and just forget about trying to take the inventor models and using them in some other software which I do not have yet?


Mook

Class of 2011 NCSU engineers

 

[aardvarkdw]

If you have the capabilities to do so, I would. Inventor is a good way of accurately drawing the things you wish to animate, so if you want the dice or the snowflakes in the snow globe to be drawn accurately down to .0000005mm, by all means use Inventor. But if you want something to look good and move realisticly and you don't care if the pips on the dice are .075in instead of .0625in, save yourself the grief and work in a graphics and animation program.

 

[mookie2836]

Will do. Just wanted a project to work on, just to play around with Inventor/any other program, while learning some good techniques along the way. Thanks a bunch aardvarkdw, been a lot of help.


Mook

Class of 2011 NCSU engineers