Problems with DC Animations
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Hello,
I'm trying to animate a set of fold-up stairs for an attic. The first problem that I wanted to overcome was having to animate the articulated nature of the stairs without having to select each nested component. I looked at the DC discussion site and noticed a similar topic posted on 30 August, but because nobody responded to this post, I figured I may have better luck in the general discussion group.
At any rate, my problems worsened. I order to place the entire component into my main model, I had to copy and paste it from my working file, and rotate it by 90 degrees. Bad move. I now started to see some very unexpected behavior. The first thing that the component did when I tried to animate it was to reorient itself to the original axis. Then, it wouldn't unfold. Each time I clicked the component to animate, it just "bounced" back to its original position. I tried to go back to my working file, deleted all the animation, rotated the component to align to the main house model axis, reset all of the component axes to align with the baseline axis (changing X to Y), and then reconstructing the DC animations. So, I solved the mysterious problem of the first DC "reorienting" itself, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why these components "bounce". I've included two files. One in which I have the behavior I expected, and one that "bounces". My understanding of how axes interacted with DCs was that the axis of the component determined the behavior of the DC that was embedded in that component and that parent or children component axes had no effect. I'm now not so sure.
So, two things that I need help with: (1) Why don't these DC's animate (i.e., "bounce" back and stay in the same state) and (2) is there a way to make an articulated DC that unfolds/folds nicely with one (or several) clicks and does not require a deep dive into nested components?
Thanks for your advice and help.
Frank.
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Hi
Best to make the rest of the assembly a function of the rotx, take a variable through the nested components
Wrap the component within another before changing its orientation so as to protect your original axis references
Cheers
Philip
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Wow, thanks Philip! I learned a lot from your example. First, component wrapping comes BEFORE axis changing. Next I really didn't understand how to propagate a variable through nested components. The trick is parent! I know what the ! means, but I was having trouble figuring out how to make a reference within the nested components that made sense. I probably could have constructed something, but your solution is much more streamlined (and intuitive). Finally, I had not thought about using a logical sequence to drive the values of the variables. In hindsight, the solution is pretty straightforward, but for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. All in all, pretty clever!
Thanks, again, for your extremely helpful post. I'm off and fixing a number of other DCs that I made that have similar issues.
Frank.
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