» » » » I need to model a flexible material that is will be used in an
» » » assembly.In
» » » » the assembly the material will be wrapped around a core like
» paper
» » » towels
» » » » are wrapped around the cardboard tube. The hard part is that I
» need
» » to
» » » be
» » » » able to Animate the Assembly showing the material un-rolling and
» » » » re-rolling like a tape measure. Can anyone explain the best way
» to
» » » » accomplish this task in Solidworks.
» » » »
» » » » Thanks
» » » » JR
» » »
» » » I've done similar animations is SW. Mine was a spring and the coils
» » » expanded as the distance was increased. I used equations to change
» the
» » » pitch and length of a spiral curve. Then I produced each frame and
» » » captured each image. I then merged the images using photoshop.
» » »
» » » I used animator to change the view and location of components, then
» » when
» » » geometry needed to change it was frame by frame.
» » »
» » » Have parts recompute their shapes during an animation is possible,
» at
» » » least from what I know.
» »
» » Please share with me how to simulate a compression spring in Solid
» Works.
»
» You have a distance between 2 components. I used a ref distance instead of
» the actual mate distance. Infact, I don't even remember if the distance
» wasn't the result of some other stuff. None the less, put a ref dim
» between the two components.
»
» Use this ref dim to drive the length of helix curve. You may want to sweep
» along this curve to make a 3D spring. As the ref dim changes, the part
» spring will regenerate and produce a spring that resizes based on the
» distance between the parts.
»
» When I did this, SW couldn't store variables in the equation editor, in
» the last couple of years this is now possible so now you can have a
» variable called index=.1 :spring_len=spring_len+index. I quess you could
» write this spring_len=spring_len+.1;
»
» This way you could drive the distance .1 each regen.
»
» I think back when I did the spring SW2001, I wrote a macro to control the
» distance. With animator, you can set it up to capture the screen when ever
» it changes. Run the macro, and animator caught all the frames. Then you
» could save them to an AVI file.

Thank you Q/A board