Yesterday, a customer emailed me after viewing my Inventor Studio webinar. She was working, in Inventor Studio, on an animation that showed a tool crimping two panels together. Her idea was to have the pre and post crimped panels overlaying each other and have the one fade out, as the other one faded in. Looking at her video it looked good, except for Inventor rendered a shadow, or something else, where the deformation occurs. The customer wanted to know if I had any ideas on how to eliminate those shadows.
I don't typically use the component fade animation in Inventor, but I do remember a former co-worker saying that they never work right for him. So that got me thinking about which other types of animations Inventor Studio is capable of, that might be able to accomplish this. Obviously, the Component, Constraint, and Positional Representations were not possible because the change we needed to see was contained in one part file. That really left me with the Parameter animation. I knew that I could drive a flange angle with a parameter, I just wasn't sure if Inventor would allow me to animate that parameter and how smoothly the animation would play. So I told the customer that I needed to test out an idea before I sent her in that direction.
The parts that get crimped looked like sheet metal Contour Flanges. So I made a test part. Then I created a cut where the the crimped sections would be. The next step was to add Flange features in the cutouts. I made sure to give the Flange Angle parameter a meaningful name, so I could work with it later in the animation. Also, I had to tweak the settings so that the new flange matched the original shape of the model. While I was creating the flanges, I made the Bend Reliefs wide enough for me to add a Loft later to fill the gaps. I was also a little worried about how the Lofts would animate, but I figured that I would cross that bridge when I came to it.
Before I went to the trouble to make the Lofts, to fill the gaps, I wanted to make sure the flanges would animate smoothly. So I saved my part, placed it in a new assembly, and entered Inventor Studio.
There are two things that you have to do to a parameter to be able to animate it in Inventor Studio. First, it has to have Export enabled. That just tells Inventor that it is allowed to use that parameter in operations like Derive.
The second step is to make sure that you have picked the parameter as a Parameter Favorite. Using the Parameter Favorites command, Inventor opens a dialog where you navigate a tree structure of your model and pick out parameters that you want to add as favorites.
In this case, the parameter animation was working great. I just had to go back and add lofts to get the flanges to blend in with the rest of the part. After I added the Lofts, I did discover that when the flange got close to the end of its movement, the automatic mapping on the lofts would change. I had to turn off the Automatic Mapping on the the Lofts.
After all of that, I had a pretty good looking animation. I will be the first to say that the Lofts are not 100% realistic to how the part would work when crimped. However, for the animation in question, it is very unlikely anyone would notice, especially because of the viewing angle in the animation.
Here is a quick sample of the finished product.
