Inventor suite the right software?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am a forensic firearms examiner and I testify quite often on the function (or malfunction) of firearms. I have used AutoCAD to model 3D firearms and show internal parts, but this does not allow me to present nice animations of  working mechanisms, for example, safety mechanisms in action.  I am not very experienced with Inventor, and have been playing around with the trial. I have tried using  constraint animation in Inventor studio, but found that the contact solver does not work.

My first question is does contact solver work in the studio environment (or is that just in dynamic simulation of Inventor Pro).

2nd question, can anyone tell me if Inventor Suite (not Pro) would be the application to use for animated presentation of internal mechanisms, or would I be better of with 3ds Max (which we already have for scene reconstruction).

Thanks in advance for any input 

[Anonymous]

I think Inventor is plenty capable to do what you’re after, but contact solver is not the way to go.

The easiest route will likely be to set up positional representations and animate them in Studio.

For instance you constrain a hammer in the cocked position, and then set up a positional representation that overrides the constraint to show it in the fired position.

Then in Studio you choose animate positional representations and it runs the animation from the cocked to the fired positions for you. The studio part is really very easy once you constrain your parts and set up the pos reps.

Run through this tutorial and I think you'll get some sanswers:

Studio - Positional Representations

You'll need to have a good understanding of assembly constraints as well, as you will be creating, overriding and suppressing constraints in verious combos to get parts to move, etc.

someone else can comment on whether there is an easier software to do this, but I think you can do it Inventor with some fundamental tools.

[stephengibson76]

Might be worth getting in touch with vsk2002, hes produced loads of very nice images of different guns.  Inventor is perfect for animating mechanical mechanisms

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor/Friday-pics-Apr-11-2008/m-p/2228744#M295251

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the responses. With regard to positional reps, I understand how these would work for rotational and linear motion (hammer rotating about an axis, or slide moving back and forth), but would it work for non-linear motion such as a cam pin that follows a curved channel? Sorry that I am a bit of a novice with this.