Animating sub-assemblies Inventor Studio

[ethompson36]

Hi,

I'm new to using the animation tools in Inventor Studio and am wondering if there are some work arounds and/or a better work flow as compared to my current method. I'm using Inventor 2013 part of the Factory Design Suite. My main issue revolves around animating sub-assemblies.

For example I animated a robotic arm moving a part from a part stand to a part rack buffer, I did this by animating the values of the driving parameters for the different constraints of the arm.(This took place in the robotic arm's top level assembly) I like this animation type better than the others as it seems to work the best and be the most precise, however if I add the robot to my overall layout assembly as a sub-assembly I lose my added user parameters and am unable to access the values of the constraints that are now one level down. It would seem the only solution to this problem is to completely re-assemble the arm in my top level assembly whereas I can then edit the values of the constraints.

Is there any work around to animating a sub-assembly(I tried using positional representations but couldn't seem to make it work) or at least some way to explode the sub-assembly so I would at least not have to recreate every constraint for the arm? I've searched and can't seem to find anything relating to a sub-assembly explode.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Evan

[yichuan.xing · Accepted solution]

Hello Evan, 

Thanks for posting this.

Please see attached picture which is also animate the constraint in subassembly. You can use this as one workaround. 

As you mentioned, you can also use positional representations as one workaround. The key point of that is  you need to create different position of your robotic arm.

Hope my answer can help you.

Thanks,

Guy Xing

[ethompson36]

Guy,

Thanks for the help! Directly animating the constraints from the sub-assembly level removes a couple steps from my current method and also keeps the overall sub-assembly integrity, all in all good solution (in hindsight i can't believe I didn't try this method before!).

Thanks again!