Spring Animation

[rthakare]

Hi,

I am trying to do a print animation for an assembly and for some reason it is not working out for me. I followed exact same instrctuins as on some videos and still not able to do it. Can someone please help me here and let me know what I am doing wrong.

Attached is the assembly with all components. and I want to slide S7 component to left side and see that spring compreesed.

Thanks.

[JDMather]

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@rthakare wrote:

Attached is the assembly with all components. and I want to slide S7 component to left side and see that spring compreesed.

Thanks.

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Did you verify the attachments?

[rthakare]

Can you not open this attachment?

[rthakare]

I am attaching all the components and the assembly again. See if you can open it.

Thanks.

[rthakare]

help...anybody???

[wimann]

You should probably make a zip file of your assembly. No one else can open it if you don't attach all of the needed parts. Respond to this with a couple of model shots of your assembly and a brief explaination of how you've attempted to accomplish your goal and what exactly your goal is and I would be happy to help you in any way I can.

There are a few ways to animate the spring so knowing what you want for your result and how you would like to approach it is important.

Thank you.

[rthakare]

Sure, See attched zip file.

[wimann]

Excellent! I've got it open. So are you wanting to use driven constraints to animate it or what? It took a couple of steps but I was able to get your spring to adapt to my offset between the two pieces (see attached). Is something like that what you're wanting to do?

[rthakare]

yes, very similar. I want to compress s7 and show the compression of the spring. I tried everything and not sure what was I missing.

[wimann · Accepted solution]

The issue, as I see it, is that your sketch for the spring has the projected geometry but has nothing dimensioned to it. You're pulling the geometry from the assembly but not telling the part file how to relate to the geometry (or at least that's how it came through when I downloaded your parts).

You'll want to tell your spring profile, the circle, to be tangent to the top line you projected from your assembly. You'll also want to go ahead and throw a few dimensions on your circle to fully constrain it. Say... a diameter and a distance from your axis of rotation. Then, I put another circle at the bottom basically representing where the spring terminates. And I used an equals constraint to make the two circles equal to one another then set the bottom circle tangent to the bottom line. Once you have that, you have the center to center spacing that your spring occupies based on the distance between the two parts in your assembly. I then placed one more dimension between the two circles vertically (which becomes a reference dimension) so that I could use it in the coil command so that the length of the coil will be determined by the sketch.

After that I went back to the Assembly level and added an offset constraint between the two internal faces of your parts and set it to a distance. And that's it. All you have to do is adjust that distance and the spring should adapt. You can the right click and "drive" the dimension to get a rough animation though if you really want quality animations, you need to use inventor studio.

I'va attached a few images to help explain my findings.

Note the use of "d14" in the coil command. d14 is the reference dimension I placed in the sketch.

ALSO!! I just realized that if you chose to drive the constraint in order to "animate" the spring, you'll need to expand the drive constraint dialog and check the box that says "Drive Adaptivity". If you want me to get you a screen shot I can. Just let me know!

[rthakare]

Thanks. Can you please also send me that assembly file along with part files in zip so that I can go through each of your step and track my mistakes.

Thanks again.

[wimann]

To be honest, I'm not sure that I can. Inventor asked me to migrate when I saved so I'm fairly certain you're using an inventor that predates 2014. In which case you won't be able to open my files. But I can try none the less.

See attached.

[rthakare]

you are correct. I can not open these files..... :(.

Thanks for your help though. I will follow your instructions and se eif I can do it.

[wimann]

Yeah have a crack at it. If you follow the images I sent you before and match them then it should work. Note that the dimension "d14" in the image I sent you might not be named "d14" in your part file. Could be "d15","d16" or so on. If you want to see the name, you can right click in your browser and go Dimension Display and set it to Expression. That will show you the name and the value and you can simply type in the reference dimension name into the "Height" box of the coil dialog (see second image lol). Last thing that's worth mentioning is that my "d14" in that sketch is strictly a vertical center-to-center dimension. Make sure it doesn't trick you by doing an aligned dimenion or giving you a to-tangent dimenion. It tried that on my a couple of times.

Good luck with it. Glad I could help.

And imho, adaptivity is for the birds. I often feel it causes more problems than it fixes. I'm pretty sure that's why some of your parts wouldn't let me move them in your assembly despite them having the "freedom" to be moved. But it's good to know how to use it in case you should need to for some reason.

[rthakare]

Hi,

I tried your suggestions and stil not be able to make it work. I changed the drawing and added few more constraint as you suggested and when i set a constraint in an assembly between two faces then my sketch got messed up. see attached pictures.

[rthakare]

Hi,

Got it working now. Thanks a lot for your help.

[wimann]

Glad to hear it! Sorry for not checking out your images sooner, I've been busy at work today. Was it because the .273 dimension wasn't in line with the direction of the spring?