SWX Animator: Inter-frame rebuilds

Hi All,

Currently doing an animation to show simplistically the interaction
between two components.

Now I've done an assembly sketch with some simple 2-d geometry with
sketch relationships tying different parts of the sketch to various
components in the assembly. By dragging the components around normally
and rebuilding, the sketch elements move as intended with each rebuild
to update to the changed position between the relevant components,

I was hoping that when I made these parts move with animator, this
same rebuilding update would occur but this does not seem to be the
case. Is there any simple way to get this updating to work or is it a
complicated thing?

I'm not rendering with PW or anything, just after a simple
screencapture animation.

 

OK,

I've managed to MANUALLY do one by using the screen-capture feature
and just doing a drag+manual rebuild (CTRL+Q). I've uploaded a HEAVILY
compressed video to show what I'm trying to achieve.

The screencapture has worked but it's obviously very jerky and
discontinuous because I've only rebuilt it about 10 times during the
anim.

http://www.jsr.com/~dinks/Misc/George/TSRs.avi <--- Download video
here (~500kb)

The sketch lines are shown in yellow and they update on rebuild when
the top subassy moves along its path relative to the bottom
subassemblies.

Any ideas on how to do this a little classier gratefully received, if
not what I've done will have to do for now

Cheers,

George.

 

If those sketch lines don't need to change in size, you can try using
a different part for each line. The position of those lines can then
be animated via angle mates, and the components that need to move
would be mated to these parts. I wasn't able to quickly figure out a
way to animate a sketch, unless you're actually editing the sketch.
Even then, the sketch would animate, but nothing that was mated to the
sketch would rebuild. Interestingly, if I just dragged the timeline
instead of pushing play, parts mated to my sketch would update. Seems
like a good enhancement request: the ability to drive assembly
animation via sketch dimensions.