Free Simple Wireframe 3D Mechanism Animation

[gwolf2]

I have a very simple mechanism with a complex 3D motion. It is a network of 9 beams with rotating joints. The motion is cyclic.

I have calculated the motion of all of the joints and generated a time history of coordinates for each one in a text file.

What I would like to do is display the mechanism as wire frame in 3D and animate it. I will need to do this many times varying key mechanism parameters. I have checked out the trajectories using nodes in my FE package but it's not really the right tool for the job.

I am considering Anim8or, OpenFX, Alice3D or maybe a student version of ADAMS. The key requirement for me is a simple text file interface for coordinates - I don't have time to learn a scripting language and I would prefer not to do it all within the animation package because I don't have time to learn it.

Any suggestions are most welcome.

Regards,

Gwolf

 

[IRstuff]

Have you looked at Alibre Express? Not sure what its capabilities are.

Nonetheless, at some point in time, you are writing a script, whether you want to call it that or not.

TTFN

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[gsal]

well...yeah...about that, it is a bit difficult to do something new without learning something new. Good luck with that.

Other than that, I bet Visual Python (the module name is vpython) can do what you want.

 

[GregLocock]

A gruesome method would be to use excel to create 2d wireframe plots for each time interval (trivial) and then write them out as tiffs (trivial) and join them together and view them as a flipbook (trivial).

A rather slow animation could be written directly in excel. But the frame rate would be sucky.

the 3d to 2d transofrmation is a one liner.







Cheers

Greg Locock


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[gwolf2]

Thanks Greg - I used Excel graphs in the end, one for each principal 3D plane - gives me 75% of what I want.

 

[FeX32]

If you only need to show the motion (ie. no forces involved) there is a matlab function that graphs coordinates. We sometimes use this in robots to illustrate the robots motion for presentations. A decent start may be here:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/635-kinematic-simulation-of-a-robot-arm

Fe