Springs - for animation, visualization, interference detection

Discussion in 'SolidWorks' started by Edward T Eaton, Feb 24, 2005.

  1. At Solidworks World, Robert McDonald showed a really terrific sample
    animation of a compression spring.
    I made the mistake of commenting that, for the sake of an animation, it is
    rough to use a helical sweep feature to make the spring because you take a
    beating on the rebuild time, and that techniques existed using simple,
    fast-rebuilding revolves to simulate a spring (at least well-enough to serve
    an animation)

    Big mistake - next thing I know, I have a handful of people handing me
    business cards so I could send them a sample model.

    The links below will allow you to download the compression spring, and an
    extension and torsion spring I had laying around. The models are for
    education on modeling strategy only - I did not look up any springs for
    real, nor did I take a ton of time to clean up the models the way I would if
    I was doing them for a customer/delivering to a customer.

    www.edeaton.com/SwxDownload/Torsion_spring.zip
    www.edeaton.com/SwxDownload/Extension_spring.zip
    www.edeaton.com/SwxDownload/Compression_spring.zip

    By the way, the compression spring is kind of cool because it shows a trick
    for getting equations to evalaute betwen frames in an animation. I needed
    the spring to be equation driven so anyone could use it to add coils, change
    diameter, etc without doing a lot of reconstruction. The spring I did a few
    years ago used equal sketch relations to flex the spring, so it would be a
    lot of work to make any cahnge. I figured I ought to beat the limitation if
    I was going to share it.

    -Ed
     
    Edward T Eaton, Feb 24, 2005
    #1
Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments (here). After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.