Animation

Animation is an effective mechanism that helps designing products. Animation helps analyze the behavior of kinematic mechanisms and mutual situation of parts in assemblies. Animation creation is a logical continuation of developing a parametric model. It allows visually inspect the impact of parameter modifications on the shape and position of the objects in the 3D scene, model operation of kinematic mechanisms, record and analyze the process of exploding the parts of an assembly. This system capability is yet another advantage of using parameterization when creating separate parts as well as assemblies. Analyzing a parametric model by means of animation allows mitigating errors at an early stage of designing a product. Use of a movable camera in animation allows creating realistic clips supporting the effects of zooming in and out, and spinning the object being viewed.

In animation, the system renders the state of the model under continuous modifications of its parameters. A requirement for creating an animation is presence of variables controlling the model parameters. For example, to have a part spinning with respect to a fixing point in animation, a variable is introduced whose value is equal to the rotation angle. In other words, the user must define variable parameters when building that model (geometrical shape or element positions) and assign the driving variables to these parameters.

T-FLEX CAD has two means for creating an animation. The first and simple one is using the command "AN: Animate Model". When animating using this command, one can vary the value of one variable from its starting to the ending value with a specified step. A more powerful means for creating animations is a stand-alone application "Animation Screenplay". This application provides control over an unlimited number of variables in the model and drive variable variations by complicated diagrams. A T-FLEX CAD document can have any number of animation scenarios included within, representing various model modification schemes.