Running interference check during animation or in animation workspace

PuzzleBoxes
Contributor

Running interference check during animation or in animation workspace

PuzzleBoxes
Contributor
Contributor

I was wondering if it's possible to run an interference check at each animation step, if you create an animation.

I've thought about this before and maybe writing a python script to do this, however if I can use already or mostly already built-in functionality that would save a lot of time.

What I need is to verify if something I designed (complex puzzle) actually works as intended as there are a substantial amount of internal (non-visible) components, that move in straight lines, at specific intervals along those lines I need to verify there isn't any interference (this would indicate that a piece actually can't be moved that way, basically checking/verifying the solution). For now you can assume that the moves along each line are in increments of 5 mm, and I want to check for interference every 2.5 or 1 mm. 

The original idea before would be write a a script that saves each component position/orientation, as well as camera position (when clicking a record button/shortcut) and then calculate the distance between each move and add steps/positions at regular set intervals (2.5mm by ex). Then run an interference check/detection and spit out a list of interferences/results once it has calculated them for all positions on that list.

However the animation workspace seems to do most of that work already, however I can't run an interference detection in said workspace, nor do I see a way to export a positions/orientations list. Should I know where/how to get it, I think I should be able to botch a script together that would be able to do this for.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. As why I'm not doing this by hand, the puzzle has over 150 steps to open, with each step requiring generally more than 3/4 checks at set intervals. This would mean probably running over a 1000 interference detections, with moving the components by hand each time (all manually), while making sure I never make a mistake in the moves and with no way to verify afterwards if the moves I did were correct. I think it should be obvious how error prone that is and time consuming.

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BrianEkins
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The capabilities of the Animation workspace are very limited, but you can do everything you want in the Design workspace.  

 

Here's a blog post from several years ago where I drove the parameters of a model through a series of steps and captured each step as an image that I then combined into an animation.  In your case, at each step, you can also check for any interference.  

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Brian Ekins
Inventor and Fusion 360 API Expert
Website/Blog: https://EkinsSolutions.com
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kandennti
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Mentor

Hi @PuzzleBoxes .

 

The animation will not be able to check for interference. It is the same with GUI operations.

 

I tried a little, but I couldn't even get component information using the API in the animation workspace.

 

I think the only way to check for collisions is to use joints and motion links in the design workspace to move the component little by little.
It's not easy, but I think there is a possibility to reach the goal with the API.

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PuzzleBoxes
Contributor
Contributor

I'm going to look into this a bit more, not exactly what I need but might be a good start.

Especially still looking how I can quickly export all components positions and orientations to a csv file/list, preferably with the camera position as well. So basically 9 columns, step (increases based on previous value in file), identifier components, xyz positions (3), orientations (3). So I want to make a button where when I press it, it adds a row for each component in the model, with all those things being added for each.

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