To begin, I’ll need something to animate, so here’s my assembly:
The intention is to have the boat pull into harbour and the
package be lowered onto it. We’ll also
have a vehicle drive past on the road behind just to make the animation a
little more interesting. Bonus points
for anyone who can name the car!
First step is to prepare the assembly for animation by
adding in appropriate mates, the intention here is to limit the axis of freedom
in the components we want to animate. In
my assembly this is the boat and the car.
As you can see in the images below I've mated the boat to a sketch line
defining the path I want it to follow. For
the car, I've mated the tyres to the road to stop it floating away when I try
to move it.
Now the assembly is prepared we can begin work on the
animation itself. We begin by ‘right
clicking’ on the model tab and selecting ‘Create new Motion Study’ if no motion
study tab is present. By switching over
to the Motion Study tab the interface used to create animations is visible. There are two main tools
that are used here: the vertical time bar and the component ‘keys’, these tools
are highlighted in the image below
A top tip here is to ensure the ‘Autokey’ functionality is enabled. This automatically creates keys in relation
to where we have our time bar placed.
The purpose of this function will become clearer when I begin to move my
components around.
I
can now start to define the movement of the components in my animation. This is achieved by firstly moving the time bar
to the desired postion, then simply moving the component in the graphics area. An example of this is shown below, firstly I
move my time bar to 13 seconds, then move the boat to where I want it to be at
13 seconds.
The
same process is then repeated for the car and boat package. A good tip if you have difficulty controlling
the movement is to ‘right click’ and select ‘move with triad’ as I do in the
images below where I move the car along the road and lower the package onto the
boat. Notice I set the package to begin
lowering at 13 seconds, this is achieved by simply dragging the start key to
the desired time location.
The
last thing left to do is set up some appropriate orientations for viewing the
animation from. This is achieved by positioning
the orientation where desired, placing the time bar where you want that
specific view to be used, right clicking and selecting ‘place key’.
Once
you have your view orientations established make use of the ‘recalculate’
button to update your study and preview your animation and that’s it! You’ve
created an animation. Use the save
button when your happy with the results.
When
saving you have extensive control over the output with the ability to define
file type, aspect ratio, frames rate and so on.
Additionally, you have a choice of renderer, with the ability to use
either the standard SolidWorks screen or if available, Photoview.
Check out the animation I created in the process of creating this blog in the video below:
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