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Animation Woes: dragging component in assy but no smooth motion!

Animation Woes: dragging component in assy but no smooth motion!

Animation Woes: dragging component in assy but no smooth motion!

(OP)
SW2011 SP2.0 System: Dell Precision M6600 w/ I7-2820QM, 12GB DDR3 1600MHz, FirePro M8900

I've always dreaded any project using Solidworks Animation. I don't know why, but it never works right for me. I can use their wizard to rotate my part/assy, but when I try to do more complex animations, it just won't work.

Right now I'm trying to animate the movement of a canopy on a beach chair. I start the animation with the chair positioned and zoomed appropriately, I move the time bar, I drag the canopy to a new position, place a key, move the time bar, drag to new position, place a key, and when I try to play back from start my computer slowly plays back the movement, but with either one single frame of interpolated movement between each of my drags, or it just jumps straight to the new position.

I've right-clicked on the key points and tried different interpolation modes (linear is what I want) but it doesn't help. It seems really buggy. In fact, I tried to go ahead and save it, hoping the conversion to an avi would work, and what I got after my computer choked for a couple minutes was static and lines and odd frames thrown in as if it was recording my screen. There were even a few seconds of me writing this actual post, with lines and static.

I know my GPU is supported; when I bought the laptop Solidworks had written some article talking about this very laptop and GPU being prime Solidworks material.

RE: Animation Woes: dragging component in assy but no smooth motion!

While the card is supported, are you sure you're using the approved driver? If it's the factory loaded driver, it probably isn't.

Jeff Mirisola
Director of Engineering
M9 Defense
My Blog

RE: Animation Woes: dragging component in assy but no smooth motion!

(OP)
Thanks. I downloaded the latest driver from Solidworks and it is working better. As in no crazy artifacts, anyways... It's still a pain to animate. Maybe I just don't get it or need a better tutorial...

RE: Animation Woes: dragging component in assy but no smooth motion!

Can you try using path mate with distance option. Then you can just give the distance value and let SW control the movement for you.

Deepak Gupta
CSWE, CSWP, CSDA
SW 2011 SP5.0 & 2012 SP3.0
Boxer's SolidWorks™ Blog

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