Animating Large Assemblies

Discussion created by Kenyon Sharp on Dec 9, 2008
Latest reply on Dec 10, 2008 by Jay Mackey

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Here are the questions I would like answered:
Besides Animator, what software packages do you use to animate large assemblies?
What do you use to create environments?

I am looking to get information from people who create animations using SW models. I work for an engineering firm that designs equipment that can sometimes be several kilometers long. (I am aware of maximum design area limitation in SW so all of my work would be to scale.) I have gone through the SW MotionManager 2008 book, but it mostly deals with small assemblies and parts. I need to animate large scenes. They do not need to be too detailed, but the animations need to have some realism.

There are three examples of what I would like to do on this pages: Click here.

Thanks.

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Rob Rodríguez Dec 10, 2008 11:45 AM
Hi Kenyon,

After viewing the linked animations I think SW motion could create a similar animation. It may not be the best tool to use for this and you'd have to have the computing power to get the job done but I believe it is possible.

As far as better software for this type of project, I'd have a look at Modo or 3D Studio Max. I believe the biggest issue with both would be the conversion of model data from SW to one of those packages. It's possible but not as easy as it could be. I've personally been looking at Modo for a while to complete some complex animation projects.

I'd be interested in others suggestions as well.
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Jay Mackey Dec 10, 2008 5:36 PM
I animated a large industrial 6-axis robot that drilled, riveted, and inspected the operation with a three-tool end-effector. It was a fairly brutal experience in SW 2008 SP1 on a WinXP x64 machine. There were about 20 holes to inspect, drill, and rivet (60 robot positions).

As I understand it, working in Meters with your equipment would be identical to me working in millimeters, where my stuff is meters-long, and your stuff could be kilometers long. Using SW9, you should be able to turn a lot of your stuff into SpeedPak items, so that much of your model is super-light on your resources, but I would definitely recommend a x64 machine with 8GB of RAM or as much as your motherboard will take, more for the modeling and assembly creation stage prior to creating SpeedPak items. I have created a SpeedPak item, but I haven't animated or rendered with it, so I hope there are no gotchas in it.

If you want to animate the material moving along the conveyor, and then having material flow out of the machine onto a heap, animate caterpillar treads, etc. would all get hideously complex in SW Motion. The only way to keep your sanity would be to create scenes or shots that allow you to only animate one thing at a time, and then splice rendered segments together into a movie. So you would end up with a shot of caterpillar treads advancing, material moving along a conveyor, the spout mechanism advancing along the length, and whatever other mechanisms you want to show, all separated into close-up shots that are separate animation projects, rendered out, and spliced into the movie. Don't try to put all the animation in one giant animation that includes everything. Don't set the camera where you could see treads, conveyors mechanism, material, spout cab, and everything moving at once. Do close ups and wide shots that allow you to simplify the animation tasks into modular projects. So a wide shot of the machine would not need to show anything but the gross movement of the most top-level assemblies: the cab along the major axis, and the axis along the ground, for example. No need to animate treads, material, gears, conveyor belts, etc. in that shot since that detail won't even be resolvable in the video produced of that particular wide shot. Then you can show close-ups of the different things, one at a time, so that you don't have to animate more than a relatively few objects in any given scene.

For polygonal animation, SoftImage XSI is very good at animation and handling huge polygon counts. Because of the nature of XSI's approach to animating, it IS possible to animate everything in one single project without losing your mind. Movies like The Transformers, Star Wars (robotic weapons), etc. can be done in XSI. Then you would have one project, and create different scenes by using multiple cameras, and recording (rendering) different shots of various portions of the machine at different points in the timeline. It also natively imports IGES, and Okino Polytrans can be used to convert even more directly from SW to XSI (or to 3D Studio for that matter). I've got the $500 dollar version of XSI, which would be perfect for this, BUT they've discontinued that version. Now they only have an Essentials version and an Advanced version. Essentials is $3K.

Of course, now EVERYTHING is owned by AutoDesk! They have 3D Studio MAX, bought Alias (Maya) a year or two ago, and now they own Softimage.
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Animating Large Assemblies

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