Complete newbie Animation question 1

[niart17]

Hey all, I'm new here so please bear with me if I ask dumb stuff already covered.

My company is now going through the Autocad to Solidworks transition and I will eventually be the guy doing any presentation animations of our products. Without getting in to specifics, the assemblies we work with are quite large with a lot of adjustments, material flow paths, heat expansion and many other elements that may eventually need some sort of animation. My first question as I dive into what Solidworks has to offer in animation is is there a "best" way to set up assemblies that it is known will have animations done? In other words, should the mates be set up specifically with a motion study in mind as it's being built or should we just build the assembly as required for engineering and then supress any mates causing issues with animation? Just from the few basic test animations I've done, I can see that having multiple motor actions on several parts at the same time can be tricky. So I guess any advice to a total newbie would be appreciated. I'm sure I'll be back with specific questions as I wander into this with my blindfold on.

Thanks

 

[Theophilus]

Yes, that's a great question. If the animation is more complex than a simple camera view moving around the assembly, you'll want a new assembly specifically made for animation.

Rule 1: Animator is buggy, and extremely resistant to edits without hosing your animation. Script (in text) out what you want to do, with the time intervals for each action, since you may need to reprogram your animation several times before it works properly.

Rule 2: Go through the built-in tutorials and all Help articles on Animator within SolidWorks. These are helpful, but not entirely accurate.

Rule 3: Reduce the complexity of your assembly as much as possible. This means everything that acts as a single mass should be a single part if possible. Cluster those things into a sub-assembly, then save the assembly as a part file. To further compact things, export that part file into parasolid (*.x_t) format, then reimport into SolidWorks. It's a dumb solid, but a quick one, probably made up of multiple bodies. SolidWorks can then treat this as a single part and drastically speed up animation.

Rule 4: If rendering with PhotoWorks, you must use native SolidWorks (not PhotoWorks) materials if you want anything to fade in or fade out, as the tutorials show. PhotoWorks materials will simply "snap" in and out--lame. But they look much more realistic. So unfortunately, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

Rule 5: You can attempt to put different axes of movement on a part at the same time, but don't--it will only result in cranial hair loss. For complex motion, mate the moving part to a surface or curve (with a point or whatever) and move it along that face/curve incrementally for movement. Sometimes this doesn't work, and you'll need to patch in extra parts that are hidden until you need to move them. For instance, I did the animations at tommygate.com with the lift gates that fold down, sometimes unfold to make a larger lift surface, and then go to the ground. That required a ridiculous number of parts to pull off in Animator, since trying to string these sets of motion with the same sets of parts is impossible (don't know why, see Rule 1 above). So the gate folds down (1 part). Show already-down-gate (1 part), hide fold-down gate (can make this timing small, like 0.1 seconds). Unfold already-down-gate's extension gate (1 part). Show lower-to-ground gate (1 part), hide already-down-gate. Move lower-to-ground gate to ground, and go through the animation until it's time to reverse all those steps. You can see it's important to have simple parts in the assembly with all this duplication, or else you'll run out of RAM and crash, or have parts flying off the screen, or having your mates melt down, or whatever. Animator seems to have been made for a simple exploded view or a walk around your assembly--not for this sort of thing with multiple types of motion (rotation, translation, etc.) for the same part.

There are more rules, but that's enough to chew on for now. Good luck. Wear a helmet to prevent your hands from removing your hair.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[niart17]

Thanks Theophilus! no need to worry about the hair loss, that's happened years ago so I'm safe as far as that's concerned. That is a lot to consider, I need to come up with a general gameplan on how we are going to try to tackle this without bogging down our servers with all the multiple assemblies, parts...etc...yikes.

By the way, we are using SW2009 now if that's makes a difference. In ya'lls opinion, would it be better to try to export the files to an external animation/render program and deal with them there? If that's what would work best, I may need to learn something like Lightwave or some other program. Ideally we'd keep everything in SW world, but if what we want is beyond those capabilities, I may just have to buckle down and learn something else.

Thanks again for all your advice.

 

[Theophilus]

You're welcome. Yeah, Animator is really quite limited. Some of this isn't really limitations with Animator so much as with the typical CAD-based stuff. So if you want flexible parts, something like Maya/Lightwave/3DSMax or similar with mesh-based models is much more suitable.

Whatever it's worth, Bunkspeed's near releasing an animation package. Right now it looks quite primitive, but after seeing recent gains with what they've done with HyperShot, I'd figure it will surpass Animator within a year (never know).

And don't discount the sorts of hacks you can figure out with Animator. When I'd first attempted to animate lift gates, I figured it was a piece of cake. Wrong. Took lots of time to figure out the hacks to make it truly work, but finally got there. I don't know how you'd attempt flow paths or thermal expansion right now, but you can probably figure it out. Actually, if you use non-PhotoWorks materials, you could fade from one size part to another size part and thereby mimic/illustrate thermal expansion. Piece of cake.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[Theophilus]

Bunkspeed's hyperMove:

http://bunkspeed.com/hypermove/

Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[rockguy]

Before I went the HyperShot/HyperMove route I'd have a look at Modo 401

http://www.luxology.com/modo/401.presets.part.1/

. It costs less than HyperShot alone and from the looks of what's coming in the new release it's far more capable than the Bunkspeed software and fully compatable with SW files.

Rob Rodriguez CSWP

http://www.axiscadsolutions.com

http://www.robrodriguez.com

http://www.robrodriguezblog.com

Eastern Region SWUGN Representative

http://www.swugn.org

http://www.nvtswug.com

SW 2007 SP 2.0

 

[niart17]

thanks Rockguy. i will definately look in to that. Modo looks like it may be exactly what we need. Now I just need to convince the powers-that-be that it would be money well spent.

 

[niart17]

Hey all. I have some success with my early attempts of animation. I have been able to get multiple motor actions happening at the same time with pretty decent results. Of course I haven't tried a full Photoworks render of them yet, but I think they will come out.

My next problem is how to simulate a flow of a material. Basically what I need is to simlulate a thick liquid filling in a cavity and following along along specific paths until the model's cavity is full, then for the material to exit in a unform sheet, like a slow waterfall. I know that sounds ambitious. Anyone have any suggestions about how to pull this off? I really would prefer to be able to render the final result in photoworks, so some of the work-arounds like fades probably won't work.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

 

[Theophilus]

You can still render the animation using PhotoWorks and get the fade-in and fade-out (from what I understand). The problem is that you cannot get PhotoWorks materials to do the fade-in fade-out stuff--you have to use the "native" SolidWorks materials. (Which version are you using, by the way--the rules may have recently changed.)

Post a diagram/sketch of how you can see inside your cavity with this flow. I know of a trick, but it only works under specific conditions. If the flow is running perpendicular to your gravity plane (like filling up a glass) and then spilling into a sheet, this can possibly be done. If the fluid takes twists and turns through pipes, I cannot think of any way to do that with any degree of realism.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Lots of configs?

 

[rockguy]

http://www.mikejwilson.com

might have some info that will help you out. Check out the printer example.

Also if you send me an e-mail rob@robrodriguez.com I can show you an animaton with some of the things you want to show. Like Jeff said, if you approach it the correct way most of it is probably achievable.

Rob Rodriguez CSWP

http://www.axiscadsolutions.com

http://www.robrodriguez.com

http://www.robrodriguezblog.com

Eastern Region SWUGN Representative

http://www.swugn.org

http://www.nvtswug.com

SW 2007 SP 2.0