Animating a part trough a curved rail

[Paul.post]

Hello forum,

I'm making a garage door and I got stuck on animating the part all the way up the rail.

I posted the part files below (names a mostly dutch).

Thanks in advance,

Paul

[Paul.post]

Wiman,

Thanks for your input on this, I'm getting alot of errors from inventor when moving my door panels up and down trough the curve.

Maybe this will help inventor understand the movement i'm trying to make.

I just still can't believe I got it to work after 3-4 weeks of learning/doing inventor (Most of the parts where already made) trying to get this motion for almost 2 weeks now.

I can't thank everybody on this forum enough!

(Next "Impossible" project comming up, lol)

[Paul.post]

Wiman,

I was playing around with you example and I noiticed a problem.

When i go to animate the travel parameter, the parts go over eachother.

Can you check if you can replecate this or am I doing something wrong trying to animate this.

Thanks in advance

(Edit I think it has something to do with putting it from Inch to mm)

[WHolzwarth]

No influence between inch and mm; the points are flipping to the 2nd possible placement.

Try my changes in the attachment (Animate parameter travel in Studio).

Walter

[Paul.post]

Thx Walter,

This works great, time to try and see if this generates less errors then the first method i used.

[wimann]

Paul,

Yeah one of the bullet points for using the part I created that I left out was that it doesn't work well if there is a large jump in the "travel" parameter. It pretty much HAS to be done incrementally or else some of the lines will likely get flipped around.

Thank you though, for your response. Glad that you're picking up inventor and running with it. There's alot of corners you've still got to explore. Keep at it. 🙂

[Paul.post]

I'm trying to recreate your example but I can't really get it to work like yours, Is the way you made sketch 1 importend to the way the animation works?

because I used a copy from the rail to get the right dimensions.

I need to make a angle of 89 deg instead of 90 and that's (for me) not possible to do in your example.

hopefully you understand what my problem is.

Thanks in advance

[VdVeek]

Paul, I can't check the other models that were posted here in this thread. But it looks like you still got some problems. The video i posted earlier is for 1 point moving along a curve. In the attachments i created an assembly (with an Inventor Studio Animation in it) that moves multiple points along a curve. With multiple points it's posible to position multiple panels. All the workpoints in curve.ipt use the same parameter to move but they use different curves. This is because the start point of these point is different for each movement.

Rob.

[wimann]

Paul,

So I've reattached a new RailSketch.ipt that should allow you to change the angle as you please. The problem you encountered could have been any number of things but the steps I went through to make sure the sketch could handle what you were asking of it were as follows:

In Sketch 1:

1. Delete Horizontal constraint in upper straight rail.

2. Apply angular dimension between straight lines.

3. Apply dimension between spline points that evenly divides the length of the line segment by the number of spaces between spline points and depends on the length of the line segment (ie. da = db/nP)

Outside of Sketches:

1. Create workpoint at starting point of sketch pathed.

2. Pattern starting point along path line for "travel" distance with "2" occurances.

3. Move "Starting Point" and "Rectangular Pattern1" above "Sketch2" in the browser.

In Sketch2:

1. Delete 4" construction line below path.

2. Project the patterned point into Sketch 2.

3. Delete coincident constraint between lowest panel end point and spline.

4. Create coincident constraint between lowest panel end point and projected work point.

And that ought to do it. Note that having "travel" > 0 for this process made it much easier to ensure I was projecting and/or constraining to the correct work point. I redesigned the use of "travel" becuase once the first panel passes over the arc, you'd have an error because the point can be no further away from the beginning of the path (vertically). Using the pattern will allow "travel" to move the first point along the entire path including the arc. I dimensioned all of the spline points because you mentioned resizing and if the resizing is drastic then the spline points require further definition so they do not fall out of place.

Again, my .ipt is attached so you can see my result. Sketch1, to answer your other question, is drawn such that the entire path is sketched with construction lines, then a spline is placed ontop of the entire path. This is so that in sketch2, the spline can be projected and you'll have a single entity to constrain your panel lines/points to. If you had multiple entities (line, curve, line) you could not tell inventor that the coincident constraint was to more than one entity to accomodate for the curve or the second line.

That's about as well as I can describe it. I hope that makes sense.

Thanks,

Will

[Paul.post]

Thx wimann looks great,

Although I coudn't get it to work propperly with my design because the distance between the door panels are not the same on every panel.

and because the door panel itself is a little off the rail its hard to get the right distance.

But it works perfectly with your first example!

Thanks everybody here for helping me with this!

[andre.chartier]

Daniel,

I am struggling with this very same concept. Your assembly and animation work perfectly for this, but I cannot follow from your files how you created the animation.

[JDMather]

@andre.chartier 

You have replied to an old thread.

You should start a new thread with a link back to this thread for reference.

In the new thread be sure to Attach the assembly of your attempt.

[andre.chartier]

Thank you for not helping. I found a solution on the university of Google.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjkgEqTpeSk