The 3D Pub

Working on examples for our 2011 release…

Today’s project is to create an assembly animation from a SolidWorks model of a power supply. There are really just 3 steps using QuadriSpace Publisher3D to accomplish this and I will go through each of them in a little detail.

Step 1: Create an Exploded View

First, create an exploded view. Optionally you could use an exploded view imported from SolidWorks, but for this examples, we will create one inside Publisher3D.

In general, this is not the same as a standard exploded view because when you are done parts may overlap some because when we create the animation, they will be hidden and shown as the step-by-step process progresses.  Also the order of the exploded steps is important because in our second step we will make use of this order. Here is the exploded view I came up with:

The rest of this blog posting will discuss commands that start from the “Illustrate” ribbon.  Below is a partial view of the Illustrate ribbon in Publisher3D 2011… take specific note of the “Illustrations” tools and the “Storyboard” tools. Here it is:

Step 2: Automatically Generate a Set of Illustrations

Second, use Smart Template Technology(TM) to generate a series of illustrations based on your exploded view. When the illustrations are generated, the current render style and viewing position will be used for all, so you may want to tweak these properties beforehand. You will find the command “Storyboard Wizard” under the Storyboard pull-down. We pick our newly created exploded view and  it automatically creates a storyboard like this:

Step 3: Make Adjustments to the Illustrations

And finally, tweak each illustration as needed and add markups as desired. For this simple example, I just modified a few viewpoints to better match the action. We can discuss adding markups to each scene at a different time. Another tweak I made was to select a different transistion between each illustration, this was done by right-clicking the transition on the storyboard. I don’t really like when the parts move at the same time that the camera moves, so I selected a transition that moved the parts first, then positioned the camera.

The Storyboard of Illustrations is now ready to be published, so I selected the Publish ribbon and then chose “Movie > Storyboard > Publish Now!”

I’ll post the video to YouTube next week.