During animation the motor is rotating in one direction at a certain time, and the opposite direction at a later time. All's well until I save the animation. Then both motors rotate in the same direction. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
During animation the motor is rotating in one direction at a certain time, and the opposite direction at a later time. All's well until I save the animation. Then both motors rotate in the same direction. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Are you saving the animation at the same frame rate that you used to calculate the animation? If not, the motor may actually be turning correctly but what you see is the stroboscopic effect which makes it look like it is rotating in the opposite direction.
The frame rate was not changed.
I'm not sure from your answer whether you set both frame rates to the same value. To elaborate, frame rate is set in two places. The first place is in the Motion Study properties. This is the frame rate that is used when you click Calculate. The second place is in the Save Animation dialog which controls the frame rate used to capture the individual frames. You want these to be the same if you want the output AVI to look like the motion study playback in SW.
If you have one value for the motion study properties, you may see the motor turn correctly. If you have a different value selected in the record animation dialog when you record the animation, SW will recalculate the motion study and then record it at the new frame rate.
If that doesn't solve it, post the files and I'd be happy to look at it.
Thanks for the help, but I tried your suggestion and it didn't help. I'm finding that when I just press the calculate button, it has the same problem.. What I'm doing is to right click the motor in the feature manager tree, and click change direction in the motor properties box. Then I'm creating the on and off keys later on in timeline. When I do this, the last direction is used at both times. I must be doing something fundamentally wrong. Thanks for you time.
If you can give me a better idea of what you are trying to achieve, I'm pretty sure I can explain how to do it, but right now I'm flying blind as you mentioned one motor in one post and then two motors in another post. You also didn't tell me what type of motor definition you are using (constant, distantce, interpolated........). If you can be a little more specific and possibly show the model, I should be able to help you.
There is one motor. First, the motor rotates in one direction. Then at a later time, the motor is supposed to rotate in the opposite direction.
To cause the motor to rotate in the opposite direction, I click the change direction icon in the motor properties box. Then I create the on and off keys in the timeline. These on/off keys are spaced a couple seconds away from the on/off keys that rotated the motor in the original direction. But when I do this, the opposite direction rotation occurs in both time segments. In other words, the motor rotates in the same direction at both time segments. I am using oscillating movement, 180 deg. Everything else in the properties box is set to default. Nothing else is changed.
To simplfy, maybe someone can simply describe a sequence of commands or button clicks that would enable a motor to rotate in one direction during one time segment, and then rotate in the opposite direction at another time segment. It would have to work after the calculate button was pressed, or the animation saved.
Thanks.
I'm assuming that you want to do something like this:
The one thing you did not say in your description was where the timebar was when you edited the motor. If the timebar was back at zero, then you edited the first key and not the key that needed to be reversed.
Here is one way to do this.
In a new Animation motion study, with the timebar at zero and AutoKey on, add a rotary motor. We will use Constant Speed for the type of motor.
Set the mortor speed and direction.
Calculate. The object should rotate at a constant speed for the length of the animation.
Drag the key for the animation length to the right to 8 seconds.
Move the timebar to 4 seconds. Right-click the mortor in the MotionManager design tree and click Edit Feature. Click Reverse Direction and then OK. This sets a key at 4 seconds with the motor going in the reverse direction. If the timebar was someplace else when you edit the motor, you are making the motor change direction at that point (wherever the timebar happens to be).
At this point, you probably expect the motor to rotate at constant speed in one direction for 4 seconds and then suddenly reverse direction and rotate in the opposite direction at constant speed for 4 seconds. What happens however is that at time zero the motor starts to rotate correctly but immediately slows down and stops at 2 seconds and begins going in the other direction until it is up to speed at 4 seconds. This is because the default interpolation mode is "Linear". We told the motor what to do at times 0 and 4 and SW had to figure out the inbetween points using linear interpolation.
To make the motor hold the initial speed until 4 seconds and then suddenly change direction, right-click the motor keypoint at 4 seconds, click Interplation mode, then select Snap. The Snap interpolation mode will hold the previous condition constant until you get to this key point where it will instantaniously change to the new values.
Now to get the motor to stop before reversing, move the timebar to something before 4 seconds, like 3.5. Right-click the motor and select Off.
Click Calculate and you should have the motion you want. You can now drag the keys to make the stop longer or shorter, etc.
The key thing to remember is that whatever change you are trying to make, happens at the timebar.
SolidWorks sells a Step-by-Step book titled "Crating Animation with SolidWorks" which has all this information an obviously LOTS more. It is about 500 pages long and you can either buy it from the SW store at http://store.solidworks.com or you can get it from Rob Rodriguez at his web site http://robrodriguez.com.
Hope this helped.
That did it. Thanks a lot Jim.
If you can give me a better idea of what you are trying to achieve, I'm pretty sure I can explain how to do it, but right now I'm flying blind as you mentioned one motor in one post and then two motors in another post. You also didn't tell me what type of motor definition you are using (constant, distantce, interpolated........). If you can be a little more specific and possibly show the model, I should be able to help you.