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Manufacturing

Set Your Design in Motion

15 Oct, 2004 By: Greg Jankowski Cadalyst

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Use SolidWorks Animator to improve design reviews, product presentations, and more

SolidWorks Animator is an add-on product to SolidWorks and is included with SolidWorks Office and SolidWorks Office Professional. You use Animator to create time-based, animated visualizations of your design, showing an assembly in different orientations, configurations, and exploded views. You can then use your animations to enhance design reviews, product and customer presentations, and assembly and manufacturing instructions.

A well-defined and constrained animation can serve as a virtual prototype of an assembly. It can help you analyze and evaluate movement, interference, assembly instructions, and parts manuals. In this article I'll lead you through the steps for using Animator to bring your design drawings to life.

The Interface
The Animator utility displays a new tab in the SolidWorks graphics area. By default, the first animation is named Animation1. You can have more than one animation within an assembly. The elements of the Animator interface are as follows (figure 1):

Animation Elements
The main actions you can add to produce an animation are as follows:

Animation Wizard	Use the Animation Wizard (figure 2) to rotate, explode, or collapse a predefined exploded view or add a predefined physical simulation to the animation. You can import only one physical simulation into an animation.
Mates	You can modify distance and angular mates between two timeframes to simulate precise assembly movement. Using distance and angle mates for parts that move in real life let you create precise motion studies and animations of that real-life movement.
Appearance	Use Appearance to show or hide a component or change the assembly components' transparency or material color during the animation.
View Orientation	Add new view orientations by unlocking the setting, as described above, and defining the new view orientation. Lock the view orientation or it changes with each new animation sequence.

When you place the mouse over a key point, a quick tip displays to indicate the state of the component at that time and what has changed after time 0 (figure 3).

Use the Animation Wizard (figure 4) to rotate, explode, collapse, or add a simulation to the animation. Explode, Collapse, and Physical Simulation are predefined within SolidWorks. Rotate Model creates a rotation sequence.

Change the Animation
When you create an animation, you can add, change, or remove an action or sequence of actions. To change or move an action, select the corresponding key point and drag it to a new time. You can select key points individually or as a sequence using the standard Windows conventions -- , , and box select.

To start the new animation sequence, move the timebar to the desired starting location, right-click, and select Place. This places a key point at the indicated start position. Move the Timebar to the ending time to make the changes display.

To remove an action or sequence, select key points and delete.

To change how the animation transitions from one sequence to the next, select the final key point in a sequence, right-click, and select Interpolation Modes. Now you can specify one of the transition options: Linear, Snap, Ease In, Ease Out, or Ease In/Ease Out.

To play and review the animation, use the Toolbar Play and Looping controls or, as described previously, drag the Timebar to the desired starting time in the animation.

An Example
I created the following animation sequence using the features described above. Each image below illustrates a step in the process.

Export Your Animation
Once you complete an animation, you can export it to an AVI file or replay it within eDrawings.

Call on SolidWorks Animator next time you want a better way to communicate your designs, this way you can continue to use information you've already defined within the assembly.