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Rotating a sub assembly in animator 2006

Rotating a sub assembly in animator 2006

Rotating a sub assembly in animator 2006

(OP)
I am trying to animate some components in a very large assembly. I've gotten my camera panning and assembly explosions to work reasonably well, but am having great difficulties getting one particular assembly to do what I need it to.

I need the assembly to explode, rotate 90 degrees, and then collapse onto a surface that is perpindicular to the starting position.  (The point is to demonstrate the product's interchangeability with other components.)

So far, I've gone through and blown out all the mates in the all assemblies (my usual m.o. when animating) and have generated the explosion for the assembly.

When I try to rotate the component (by using the "move" option in the animator tree), the parent sub-assembly is selected and *all* the parts in said parent sub-assembly are moved into limbo.

I'm at my wit's end. Any help will be appreciated...

RE: Rotating a sub assembly in animator 2006

This sort of thing is very difficult to do.  I had something similar I needed last year and was able to create a hack of a solution that worked great.

Sounds like your parts moving "into limbo" means things are thrown around uncontrollably when you attempt the rotation, correct?

Unless anyone else knows something clever, I'd recommend adding the components you need to your assembly multiple times.  So you start with your first subassembly--explode it.  Fade out the appearance while fading in the appearance of an identical--but already exploded--subassembly.  All your parts will need to line up, or you'll notice a shift in their placements.  Your fade out/fade in can blend such that you have a .5 second fade in immediately followed by a .5 second fade out.  Now you can manipulate your new subassembly without things flinging apart.  Unless I'm reading this incorrectly (not sure of your explosion vectors), you should be able to set this explosion--as-is--on your new surface.

If I'm not reading this quite right, you can use this fade in/fade out trick to fake other things.

Your second sub-assembly should be added to the assembly such that you can edit your first assembly's explosion to match the component positions.  Your second assembly will be pre-exploded--meaning it's actually built as an exploded assembly, so you don't have things unconstrained and flinging about when you move/rotate it.

Let me know if this works.

Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reason trumps all.  And awe trumps reason.

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