Create an animation of your product

Animate a mechanism - Exercise

In this lesson, you create an animation of the gear train by animating cameras, leveraging design view and positional representations.

Learning objectives

• Animate the motion of an assembly.
• Animate the visibility of components.
• Animate the view of the components.
• Generate a rendered animation.

The completed exercise

1. Open Belt Driven reducer.iam file.
   
   
   
   
2. Enter the Inventor Studio environment.
3. Select the Animation Timeline tool.
4. Open the Animation Options selecting the icon on the right end of the Animation Timeline.
5. Set the length of the animation to 5 seconds.
   
   
   
   
6. Start the Fade tool and select all of the components that are not part of the immediate gear train.
7. Set the Action to change the visibility from 100% to 0.
8. Specify the Time for the action to be from .3 to 1 second.
   
   If you miss a component in selection, repeat the step using the same settings.
   
   
   
   
9. Set a view of the gear box housing and create a camera from the view using the right-click option on the Camera in the browser.
   
   
   
   
10. Start the animate Camera tool on the toolbar.
11. On the Turntable tab set the Action to Z Origin, set the direction to counter-clockwise and the Revolutions to .45 +/-.
12. Specify the Time from 0 to 4 seconds.
    
    
    
    
13. Use Pos Reps to animate a transition from the Master positional representation to the Rotate Gears representation.
14. Specify the start at .5s and the end to 4.8s.
    
    
    
    
15. On the Animation Timeline, set the view based on Camera1 and click Play to view the animation.
    
    
    
    
16. Start the Render Animation tool and set the resolution to 800x600.
17. Set Camera1 at active.
18. On the Output tab, set the end of the Time Range to 5s.
19. Set the Render by iteration value on the Renderer tab to 15 and the Lighting and Material Accuracy to Low.
20. Click Render and set the file type to .avi to create a video.