Autodesk Inventor 2014 - iLogic – Create Animation of Part Manufacture

by Luke Davenport

Anyone here using Inventor Studio? Me neither, but I came across an interesting one recently. An Inventor user on a training course mentioned that they were using Studio to produce a video of a sheet metal part being folded and assembled together, using keyframes and varying parameters. Surely iLogic could do a pretty good job of that I thought?

Well it’s pretty simple – all we need is the following skills with iLogic and we’re good to go:

1)      How to set the value of a parameter in a sub-component from the top level assembly.

(Try the following to control ‘Angle1’ parameter in ‘Top-Section:1’ part):

Parameter("Top-Section:1", "Angle1") = Angle1

2)      How to set up a ‘slider’ control for parameters so you can change the values by dragging them around.

As both of these are pretty basic iLogic functionality it didn’t take me too long to put a model together with a nice iLogic form to do the following:

1)      Assemble a few components.

2)      Show some sheet metal components being folded into shape.

3)      Show a spring being compressed in the assembly.

Of course – you will need some form of screen capture software for this. As mentioned in a previous blog, we use Techsmith’s Camtasia here at Cadline, but Techsmith also produce a very good free version called Jing – download it here: http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/

Check out my customary video for this by clicking on the picture at the top of the page  – it contains a quick explanation of how to set this up, and then shows the final video result from the iLogic animation.

Hope you find this useful!