Design & Tech CAD
Manual Positioning
Mechanisms
Animation
Simulation
** Warning - asm. referencing
A 'Top Down' design approach using references from other parts within the asm. can cause failures if you then start moving those parts relative to each other using connections - pretty logical really. Use Copy Geometry rather than picking up the refs directly.
Mechanisms
The mechanism extension allows you to simulate and analyse a mechanism which has sliding and rotating joints. Once the assembly has been created it can be simply dragged on screen or motors can be attached to the joints which will simulate a controlled movement through an analysis.
We have both the Kinematic [simple movement] and Dynamic [movement influenced by gravity and friction] license. The Dynamic module is not taught in the Department.
Animation
The Animation extension is primarily a presentation tool which outputs an Mpeg video file. In its simplest form we could look at a model from different camera angles or we could explode and reassemble the model, view from different angle and have motors driving our joints.