2009

Table Of Contents
Animating Assembly Components
Mechanical assemblies are rarely static. By animating the movement of
constrained assemblies with Autodesk Inventor, you can examine your model
throughout its range of motion. Use Inventor assembly animation to visually
check for component interference and examine mechanism movement to
improve your designs.
In this two-part exercise, you first constrain a component in a lift fixture
assembly. You examine degrees of freedom as constraints are applied, and
examine the motion of the assembly by dragging a strategic component in
the graphics window.
In the second part of the exercise, you replace a simplified representation of
a component in an assembly, define an angle constraint for a pivot, and then
animate the assembly using the unique constraint driving capabilities of
Inventor to check where component interference occurs.
You can view degrees of freedom for a part in the Properties dialog box
available from the right-click menu in the browser. In the Properties dialog
box, on the Occurrence tab, you can turn the Degrees of Freedom option on
or off. The Degrees of Freedom option is also located in the View menu.
This exercise demonstrates how to properly constrain an assembly for motion
analysis.
The completed exercises are shown in the following figure.
TRY IT: Remove a degrees of freedom constraint
1 With the project tutorial_files active, open the file remDOFs.iam. The
assembly should look like the following figure.
178 | Chapter 10 Analyzing Assemblies