From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Making Movies

Rotating the model - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Making Movies

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Rotating the model

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- [Instructor] We're going to be using the model 03_01_b4. And once again we've got this little plastic enclosures that's got a printed circuit board and a bunch of connectors and I want to provide instruction on how to put this together. Maybe to a contract manufacturer, someplace overseas who are going to be assembling these parts for me. Notice if I go to my configuration manager I have an exploded view. I can explode it out, so you can see how the parts fit together and I can collapse it. All right? Now the fastest, easiest, full-proof, dummy, I don't have time to deal with it, way to create any kind of animation is to use the camera wizard. And the camera wizard is located right here. So notice right here it's the animation wizard. It's got this little camera with the magic wand next to it right at the top of the bar, here for your animation interface. And the animation leverage is off your existing model so if you don't have a model or you don't have an exploded view the animation wizard isn't going to help you very much. But if you've got your assembly all put together and your exploded view nicely defined, it's going to work really well. It's really important on your exploded view when you explode it and you've got these steps, you kind of want to review your steps to make sure that the order of the steps in your explosion, or in your exploded view, is the order that you want to see them in your animation. If they aren't ordered correctly, remember you can always right-click, go edit feature, and you can move these around. So notice here I got step four before step three so if you don't like the order of operation you can modify that. All right? So you can make quick changes as you go. We're going to use the animation wizard to just rotate the model. So I'm going to collapse my model so that it's all put together and all I want to do is, I want to rotate it around. Think of, like if you've ever been to a car show and they have the latest hot rod up on a circular platform and they're rotating it around in the showroom so people can view it from all sides. You want people to be able to admire your product from all sides. You can use the animation wizard to do that. So I'm going to click on the animation wizard and notice it'll do a rotate model. Notice I've got rotate model, explode model, collapse. Right, I'm going to do rotate model and then I'm going to say next. Then it asks me what access do I want to do it. Notice I've got a little preview here. So if I change what access it shows me how the rotation will work depending on what axis I select. So it kind of gives you preview so you can kind of give an idea. And you can go clockwise or counterclockwise. And I'm going to rotate on the y axis and I'm just going to do five rotations. Okay, and then I'm going to say next. And then it asks me the duration. So the duration is how long. If I picked five rotations, how long do I want those five rotations to take? So if I have my duration as 10 seconds and SolidWorks will give you their best guess based on your model size, what they think will look nice. And remember you've got those speed controls as well to control the speed. And you can set your start time. And normally I kind of like pause a beat so I might add two seconds to the start time so that when your animation starts it doesn't immediately start rotating. You have, like, a couple seconds to kind of introduce your model to the audience and then it'll start rotating. And notice, so if the start time set to two seconds and the duration's at 10 seconds then the end time is going to be 12 seconds, do the math. So then you go finish. And then notice what it did here. It did a bunch of orientation and camera view changes right here. See all the key points? And notice where the time difference is on the key points. We said every two seconds so every two seconds you have a new key point. Do you see that? Kay. So it's basically boom, boom, boom. And notice that as I hover over it shows me what it's going to look like at that key point. It gives me a preview. All right. So if I want to see what it's going to look like I want to click on calculate before I even start. That's basically animation compiling the code for creating the animation. And notice there's that two second pause and then it rotates. And notice where the animation's ending. It's ending at 12 seconds. So you didn't have to do a lot of thought there because SolidWorks basically did all the heavy lifting for you. All you had to do is tell it what you wanted it to do.

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