I can't manipulate a joint with my mouse like in the tutorial videos!

[Anonymous]

Several tutorial videos featuring joints show the video author easily manipiulating joints with the mouse pointer. They just seem to point over a jointed component, click and drag, and the joint manipulates about its degrees of freedom. Looks easy, but I can't do it. I can't grab jointed components and manipiulate them with my mouse pointer no matter what I try. In the sample video I've uploaded, the truck is grounded, the tailgate is not, the joint can be animated and moves as expected, but I can't grab the tailgate with the mouse and make it open and close like I see jointed models be manipulated in the tutorial videos. Nor can I make it work if the truck is "ungrounded". Is there a command or modifier I need to use? or...?

Thanks!

[James.Youmatz]

Hi @Anonymous,

I'm having a hard time telling what is going on from the screencast unfortunately. Do you mind sharing a public link to your design with me? I know you mentioned that the truck is grounded, but the tailgate is not, but from what I am seeing it is almost like the entire truck is grounded as when you click and drag it, nothing moves at all. If you click and highlight the tailgate, it should underline what component it is under in the Browser Tree. Just to check - is that compenent in the family of the grounded component that you had? 

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hello James,

Thanks for responding. Here's the link: http://a360.co/1URLpzw   Password is "taco".

Do you also need links to the linked components?

[James.Youmatz · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Nope! So when you export a .f3z file all the individual designs that are linked are included as well.

So I think I found the culprit! The problem is that your tailgate is made up of meshes, but the joint is applied to the two patches on the inner portion of the tailgate. You can see in the video below, that if I select the inner patches and then try to manipulate the joint (after grounding the Tacoma sub-component), the joint is displayed just fine. Meshes are unable to have joints applied to them or be moved by clicking and dragging so when you click and drag on the mesh, nothing happens. In the video what I did was first break the link to your component (this is unnecessary, I just didn't want to have to go back to the original file to edit it) and then created a base feature so I would be in a direct modeling environment to manipulate the mesh on the tailgate. Once in there, I converted the mesh to a BRep (boundary representation) and it converted your tailgate into a stitched surface. Then, I was able to grab any portion of your tailgate and it would now work! It is completely up to you if you want to convert the mesh or not. Like I said, the only difference it made was that instead of just grabbing the inside portion of the tailgate to display the joint, I can now grab any portion. You may lose some quality when converting the mesh to BRep, but from what I can see it looked pretty good! Here's the video:

Let me know if you have any questions!

P.S. This really made me hungry for some tacos!!

[Anonymous]

Hey, that's great and I learned a new trick. Thanks. The truck is meant to be low res. It's there just so that I can see my design in context of where it will end up. So the quality of it is not particularly important, just that it looks OK.

Nigel