From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Making Movies

What the different tools do - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Making Movies

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What the different tools do

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- [Instructor] So in order to get started, first we have to get into the Motion Study interface. And what you see is a small plastic box that I designed that has a printed circuit board with a bunch of connectors in it. And let's say I wanted to create an animation of how this box is assembled so that when it goes overseas or goes to a contract manufacturer, they have a very fast and easy way of knowing how to put it together. And they don't necessarily need to understand English, because, as we all know, a picture, or in this case an animation, is worth a thousand words. Well, most of us in SOLIDWORKS are working in the model space. And we have this Model tab down here to prove it. But the Motion Study interface where we create our animations is over here in this tab where it says Motion Study 1. So if you click on that tab, you enter into an Alice in Wonderland type world with the top half of your screen like what you're used to in SOLIDWORKS. You have your display window, your heads up display, your ribbon, your standard tool bar, quick access tool bar, your model tree, and you see all your parts just like you did before. But in your bottom half, these are all your animation tools. And notice we can create an animation or we can create a Motion Study. We're gonna be working in the animation interface. There are some classes on the Motion Study tools in the library, so I highly recommend that you look at those, because those will just expand your horizons in terms of the tools that you'll be able to use within SOLIDWORKS. But we're gonna be focusing on the animation tools. And you'll notice we have a second browser here that looks very similar to the first one in terms of it has the same parts in it, but if you expand it, notice each part or assembly has these Move, Explode, and Appearance underneath them and also the Mates. And notice over here we have a timeline, which is the seconds, all right. And don't worry if it's only going to 20 seconds, because basically it will expand based on what you do. Notice if you wanna see more of your display window, you can collapse that motion manager window so you can just focus on your part. You still have the basic tools up here. And then when you're editing or setting things up, you can expand it again. Notice you can zoom to fit, zoom in, zoom out down here. So if you wanted to change things, you can do that. You can change this timeline. So as you add more features, you can move the time bar or change the time bar or do other things. So don't think you only have 20 seconds to work with. You have as much time as you need to create your animation. You have standard tools here. There's a Calculate tool, and basically what that does is it kind of extrapolates how things are going to move from place one to place two or position one to position two. And Play from Start, which you should be familiar with, Play, and then Stop, pause. You can come over here, and depending on your length of animation, this is like the time bar, so you can move forward and backward in your animation. You can set the speed of your animation, how fast it's gonna play in terms of frames per second. You can change how it plays back. You can save it. There's an Animation Wizard, which we're gonna be going over in another segment. There's Autokey, which creates your keys. These are your key points right here. And notice each key point comes with this little toolbar where you can move something or change your mate or change appearance. These key points are really, really important, because they are what control what happens when. And this allows you to add or update a key point. And then these tools right here are what are used in the Motion Study. So I'm not gonna be going over these tools. If you're interested in these tools specifically, again, go in the library and do a search for Motion Study tools or Motion Study lessons, and you're gonna learn so much about how motors and springs and contacts and gravity and how to manage your Motion Study. These actually simulate how parts work in real life. We're making more smoke and mirrors type movies.

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