Solidworks Animation Question

1) I'm having trouble with Solidworks animation. I must not be narrowing my google searches down well enough because I get inundated with irrelevant posts or redundant sites. My searches on the fora and sites I -do- know of have been rather slim picking on this topic.

Does anyone know of any good resources and tutorials for a generally advanced user to get up to speed on Solidworks animation? I've minor experience with Max and Maya, with exceptional experience in Autocad, and moderate experience in Inventor. Just need to get up to speed on what Solidworks can and cannot do, really. I need to know -everything- :)

2) A very odd... rather specific... problem looming in my horizon; I have to animate a camera on a tripod-like-mount. That's easy. However, this camera has an LCD screen attached (like most do, these days) and I want to be able to show a semi-accurate (but not critical) LCD display of what the camera sees, as if the camera were "ON" and recording, with the LCD screen showing the camera view. I am _ASSUMING_ this is beyond what Solidworks can do, as it is beyond what any CAD package would be expected to do... if I'm wrong - PLEASE ADVISE! However;

Does anyone have any suggestions for software that can help me edit a video to create this result? I am thinking I could render an animation from Solidworks/Photoview with a blank LCD screen, and then edit the mock-up of the camera's view onto the blank LCD screen using some form of video editting software. I'm thinking I could probably generate the LCD screen images from a separate Solidworks camera animation simulating the camera view, in the model.

Long time lurker, first time poster, I'm an ex-pat from theSwamp.org - and figured I'd migrate here, since I just jumped ships to a new job using Solidworks, instead of Autocad Thanks in advance for any guidance..

HMM i'm unsure if SW will let you do the view on lcd like you said. i also think your best bet is to make 2 animation sequences

1- the camera moving

2- the view from the cameras lens moving along the same path as your initial animation

I would then edit them in a video editing package. I'm sure if you google view editing you will find something that is along the lines of what you need to do!

As for SW tutorials what type of work are you trying to achieve? any particular discipline?

Regards,

Rob

HMM i'm unsure if SW will let you do the view on lcd like you said. i also think your best bet is to make 2 animation sequences

 

1- the camera moving

2- the view from the cameras lens moving along the same path as your initial animation

 

I would then edit them in a video editing package. I'm sure if you google view editing you will find something that is along the lines of what you need to do!

 

As for SW tutorials what type of work are you trying to achieve? any particular discipline?

 

Regards,

 

Rob

Thanks for the reply.

As for SW tutorials, I have the basics down, and need to mainly focus on rendering/animation, moderate to advanced/mastery topics. I have pretty good experience with Autocad, with some in Max and Inventor. I've been using Solidworks for a few weeks now and have a handle on it again, but I really need to tackle the animation of Solidworks assemblies. I also have Photoview360, which I've played with a minor bit. OOTB the rendering seems pretty nice, but I haven't had any animation to play with, really.

As for type of work, I'm in metal fabrication, mostly CNC related, though we farm out some castings. We occasionally do some minor machine building including step motors / servomotors, bearings, and what not. However for the animation, I purely need a whiz-bang Dog & Pony Show to really 'sell' our product to an interested party.

welcome aboard. It sounds like you want to do basic animations in solidworks. Inside animations there are 3 types(2 of which are motion based and use physics and interactions).

As far as the lcd thing goes i would say no to getting something right out of solidworks. You may look into 3dvia(i think its a free download).

http://www.3dvia.com/

I have made a few videos on rendering that tackle basic animations but i dont know of anything off hand for advanced animations. The camera thing sounds like a basic setup to me. There is also an animation wizard built in that will simplify things for some operations.

http://www.mymlcservices.com/index.php?option=com_hwdvideoshare&task=viewcategory&cat_id=16&Itemid=306&limitstart=9

welcome aboard. It sounds like you want to do basic animations in solidworks. Inside animations there are 3 types(2 of which are motion based and use physics and interactions).

 

As far as the lcd thing goes i would say no to getting something right out of solidworks. You may look into 3dvia(i think its a free download).

 

http://www.3dvia.com/

 

I have made a few videos on rendering that tackle basic animations but i dont know of anything off hand for advanced animations. The camera thing sounds like a basic setup to me. There is also an animation wizard built in that will simplify things for some operations.

 

http://www.mymlcservices.com/index.php?option=com_hwdvideoshare&task=viewcategory&cat_id=16&Itemid=306&limitstart=9

Thanks for the help! I'm looking into the 3dVia products, and will jog through that MyMLC site afterwards.

Well it turns out that the feature I was wanting in regards to the animation is referred to as "Setting Video/Movie as Texture" so that instead of using an image as your texture map, you use a movie file. Simple as that! Once I knew the right thing to plug into Google, really, I started getting results. Multiple programs can accomplish is including Artlantis, Autodesk Maya, and Blender. I went with Blender, and am testing it now - and it looks quite promising!

Mainly updating the solution in case anyone else happens across this post in a search..

Thats great news and thanks for the update!! ill have to give that a shot next time im playing around with this.

Thanks!

Thats great news and thanks for the update!! ill have to give that a shot next time im playing around with this.

 

Thanks!

It's just a test assembly I put together with a couple mechanical functions, and a camera rotation, just to produce a random animation. Then, opened up Blender, with a basic cube object, and set it's material to have a movie as the texture map by selecting the output .avi file from Solidworks/Photoworks.

And I thought this was going to be tough

The only issue I -might- have is going to be quality. My initial test ends up with a rather over-compressed video, but it might be ok for my example. I'll have to play with options/settings in Blender.

Photoview kinda sucks. Its ok for a basic, short animation, but asking it to do fully rendered video with lighting/textures etc it falls on its face. WAY too slow and just doesnt cut the mustard. I recently used it to generate a fully rendered 90 second animation that needed to look good on a 52" flat panel. After an untold number of failures I ended up doing what a lot of others do. Let photoview churn out individual tga files then use a separate program to stitch them together into a video (Adobe After Effects). My 90 second clip took photoview around 2 days to render. Even then, it failed twice. Luckily using tga output, you can play with SW and get it to render a section of the animation so I was able to pick up where it crashed.

I also find the SW animation timeline lacking and rather counter intuitive. Multiple constraint states really gets interesting.

If its something you will be doing a lot of, look for a 3rd party solution to handle the heavy lifting.