Creating and Playing Motion Animations

You can create animated motion from your physical products and component assemblies.

Before you begin: Create a mechanism for a physical product or component assembly.
Important:
  • The mechanism must include angle and distant to simulate movement. For more information, see Creating Mechanisms.
  1. From the Mechanism section of the action bar, click Kinematics Player to list the joints to animate in the selected mechanism. You can also display the bodies and joints under the Mechanisms design to list the products and joints. You can also display the bodies and joints under the Mechanisms design tree.
  2. In the Kinematics Player dialog box, click Manage Controlled Degrees of Freedom to list the mates chosen in the Mechanisms design.

    Select the Show included products and mates option to display every product and mate - All the mates are listed after the mates.

    OptionDescription
    Manage Controlled Degrees of Freedom. Displays all the mates that were selected in the Mechanism list. The controls for the select mates are displayed in the Kinematics Player. You can lock the positions or adjust the model's position using the slider.
    Reset All. Resets the model to its position when the Kinematics Player command was started.
    Lock All. Locks all of the mates positions in the Kinematics Player.
    Note: When unlocked at the top of the Kinematics Player dialog box, you can individually lock any of the listed mate positions.
    Unlock All. Unlocks all of the mates positions in the Kinematics Player.
  3. From the Controlled Degrees of Freedom list, select the joints to animate and then click Manage Controlled DOFs to return to the first Kinematics Player dialog box page.
    The dialog box appears providing commands for calculating and playing animations at specified frame rates. You can create additional Kinematics Player studies and define a different set of animations for the components.
  4. Adjust the sliders or enter a value in the Kinematics Player dialog box for any of the mates to animate.

  5. Click in the Kinematics Player dialog box when done.