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Can I use Animator to ...

Question asked by John Ferguson on Sep 27, 2007
Latest reply on Dec 18, 2007 by Jay Mackey

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Hello All,

Is it possible to use Animator to animate between 5 different configs?

I have a situation where I have 5 configs (Down, Up-1, Up-2, Up-3, Up-4) and I would like to animate from Down to Up-4 with pauses at Up-1, 2 and 3.

Is this possible? How?

Muggs

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Mark Kaiser Sep 27, 2007 3:00 PM
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If what you're wanting to do is show each of the configurations at different times, yes, you can do this.

Brief description...

Build an assembly with the part, but insert it the same number of times that you have configurations you want to show. Animator will allow you to make the parts transparent, and you can set this up individually and by time (have one visible, the rest transparent, then change which are transparent/visible). Another way to make the parts appear/dissapear is to have them move in and out of the viewing area you are using. You can have pauses, this will just be times when no parts are moving or changing display states.

I don't think you can control which config is showing using Animator.

Hopefully this helps.
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- Gerald Davis @ Mark Kaiser on Sep 28, 2007 2:08 PM
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  Mark -
  I like your suggestion of using an assembly with the same part manifesting in different configurations and then using Animator to show/hide those parts.
  
  My first reaction to John's question was "send in an enhancement request" - Animator should be enhanced to allow selection of configurations.
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- Jay Mackey @ Mark Kaiser on Dec 14, 2007 3:44 PM
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  Mark Kaiser wrote:
  
  If what you're wanting to do is show each of the configurations at different times, yes, you can do this.
  
  Brief description...
  
  Build an assembly with the part, but insert it the same number of times that you have configurations you want to show. Animator will allow you to make the parts transparent, and you can set this up individually and by time (have one visible, the rest transparent, then change which are transparent/visible). Another way to make the parts appear/dissapear is to have them move in and out of the viewing area you are using. You can have pauses, this will just be times when no parts are moving or changing display states.
  
  I don't think you can control which config is showing using Animator.
  
  Hopefully this helps.
  
  The big downside to this is that if you have, for example, a pneumatic cylinder that has a retracted and extended config, and you want to switch between states, using the hide/show on two instances results in an instantaneous state change, not a true animation of the extension or retraction. Considering that you are trying to do a 'motion study' with semi-accurate timing on various operations, it is best to animate the mate that drives the extension of the cylinder. But to do that, you have to dissolve the sub-assembly (unless I am missing something), which is another huge nuisance. This can make your list of animation items very long and therefore very cumbersome to work with since you basically end up with a huge assembly that is one level deep (no or few sub-assemblies). I've used folders to act as a kind of sub-assembly to help control the organization of components and mates in the timeline, but you can only create one level of folders this way (no folders within folders).
  
  It is very handy to group mates you are using in the animation into folders, and drag them all up to the top of the mate list so that all animated mates can appear in the timeline at the same time. This is absolutely critical in SW since you have to select a group of key-points and drag them to a new position many, many times over the course of a project.
  
  This might be far less necessary if SW had the concept of selecting a block of TIME in addition to being able to select one or more key-points. Then, empty or non-empty time-blocks could be cut, copied, deleted, inserted, pasted-over, etc., making manipulation of the timeline quicker and easier. You should also be able to just click a spot on the timeline and insert a precise amount of time at that spot, so that if a cylinder takes one-second to extend, you could EASILY change the cylinder extension to 2.75 seconds, which in this case, needs to push the entire subsequent time line out by 1.75 seconds. The only way to do this now is to select all of the affected key-points and drag them out by 1.75 seconds, which is cumbersome on a large list of animated items on a long timeline. It's easy to miss key-points, especially since there seems to be a 'bug' or feature that when some items are collapsed that have sub-items that are key-framed, the key-points of those sub-items are not displayed at all.
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  - Mark Kaiser @ Jay Mackey on Dec 14, 2007 6:54 PM
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    Jay,
    
    In response to
    
    "Considering that you are trying to do a 'motion study' with semi-accurate timing on various operations, it is best to animate the mate that drives the extension of the cylinder. But to do that, you have to dissolve the sub-assembly (unless I am missing something), which is another huge nuisance."
    
    You don't have to dissolve a sub-assembly in a final assembly to get motion from it. You need to make the sub-assembly flexible in its properies.
    
    If you don't have any experience with flexible sub-assemblies, you may want to review them for you robot.
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    - Jay Mackey @ Mark Kaiser on Dec 18, 2007 10:40 PM
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      Mark Kaiser wrote:
      
      Jay,
      
      In response to
      
      "Considering that you are trying to do a 'motion study' with semi-accurate timing on various operations, it is best to animate the mate that drives the extension of the cylinder. But to do that, you have to dissolve the sub-assembly (unless I am missing something), which is another huge nuisance."
      
      You don't have to dissolve a sub-assembly in a final assembly to get motion from it. You need to make the sub-assembly flexible in its properies.
      
      If you don't have any experience with flexible sub-assemblies, you may want to review them for you robot.
      
      I have plenty of experience, which is how I know you've probably never used them in an animation. Besides, what is there to review? Half a page in the help system, with nothing relating to animation. You could have told me more about them than SW help does in the time it took you to type the above. The only conceivable way to use them would be to suppress or delete one or more sub-assembly mates and replace them with a top-level assembly mate to act as the driver, or go without the mate. leaving a degree of freedom and keyframe position of one or more components. A flexible assembly cannot be edited in place, meaning you can't do anything with the mates of the subassembly. Even if they were editable within the context of the top assy, the sub-assembly mates can't be animated anyway.
      
      There may also be other issues that prevent using them in animations, but the above was enough for me in my situation.
      
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John Ferguson Sep 28, 2007 2:39 PM
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Hey guys thanks for the replies.
What I have IS an assembly with 5 configs. But whenever I switch configs Animator resets.
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- Mark Kaiser @ John Ferguson on Oct 1, 2007 10:16 AM
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  You can still use my first suggestion, just insert your current assembly into a new assembly 5 times, have all 5 different configurations shown, and use Animator to control visibility of the configurations at different time points.
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  - Jay Mackey @ Mark Kaiser on Dec 14, 2007 3:12 PM
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    Lin Shaodun wrote:
    
    Mark Kaiser wrote:
    
    You can still use my first suggestion, just insert your current assembly into a new assembly 5 times, have all 5 different configurations shown, and use Animator to control visibility of the configurations at different time points.
    
    Very good work around,,, only issue is the assembly can not be too huge...
    
    What do you mean by 'too huge'? What happens?
    
    I have a 4-bar linkage, 6-axis robot with a complex end-effector, with a complex sheet-metal workpiece and a lofted surface workpiece, and still need to add a few more items. I'm having to use some of the tricks such as using a clone of something that gets shown or hidden at different points to work around the endless limitations in Animator (SW08). And I still need to add some more pieces.
    
    I would appreciate a heads-up on what might happen if my assembly gets too big or complex.
    
    As it is, playback in animator is useless. I have to render out to see if the timing is right. Even scrubbing the timeline (moving the timebar up and down the timeline) has gotten sluggish to the point that it is not too useful.
    
    P.S. Even if the config change could be keyframed, it probably would NOT actually result in an 'animated' effect, interpolating position over time, since many configs are based on suppressing and unsuppressing various mates. Unsuppressing a mate in animator results in instantaneous state-change with no interpolation of the change over time. If a config could be set up to change the distance value in a distance mate, then it might have the desired affect, except that mates within sub-assemblies are invisible to Animator (hence the need to dissolve sub-assemblies), so that would have to be changed as well.
    
    Thanks,
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Kelvin Lamport Oct 7, 2007 1:55 PM
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You can also use the macro shown in thread559-156192 at www.Eng-Tips.com to iterate through the configs while recording screen captures.
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