The basic premise of what I'm trying to do is this: Create an
animation of a machine excavating soil.
I'm not going to bother with simulating the particle dynamics involved... I'm quite sure that such an effort would be exhausting, if even possible in SW. What I'd like to do is simulate a "trench" growing in length as a machine passes over it. Normally, I'd just make two parts (a slotted ground and a slab fitting inside the slot) and have the distance mate between them increase through time. That won't work once textures are added, since it will seem a whole slab of material is moving.
Any ideas? Is this even possible?
I'm not going to bother with simulating the particle dynamics involved... I'm quite sure that such an effort would be exhausting, if even possible in SW. What I'd like to do is simulate a "trench" growing in length as a machine passes over it. Normally, I'd just make two parts (a slotted ground and a slab fitting inside the slot) and have the distance mate between them increase through time. That won't work once textures are added, since it will seem a whole slab of material is moving.
Any ideas? Is this even possible?
Make a single ground part without a trench. Place it in the assembly and make an assembly-based cut to simulate the trench. You can then keyframe the length dimension of the trench. Depending on how you make the cut, some of the faces of the cut will not look "correct" during animation because the textures move. Other faces will look fine. In my opinion, this looks better than my initial method... but it's still not optimal.
The bug that I found is that once you view the initial animation of the trench growing, scrubbing through the animation again will not show the trench grow. If you save the animation to an .avi, however, the trench WILL grow (as expected).
For example. You have a 20" long block with a 2" long assembly cut at t=0. Move the timebar to 2 seconds. Change the length of the assembly cut to 10". Before calculating the motion, save the animation. As SW calculates the animation during the save process, you will see the trench grow, as expected. If, after saving, you bring the timebar back to t=0, the trench will stay at 10" and will not shrink to 2" as expected.
As I said, this is a UI problem, since subsequent movie generation works as expected. To workaround this problem, slide the timebar to t=0, open the assembly cut's sketch for editing, do nothing to the sketch, and save the sketch.