Animation possibility

lawrence_tang288

Hello,

I don't ask questions a lot here but I found it necessary since it might save me some time.

I'm getting towards the stages where I start animating stuff for my project and I'm not quite experienced with animations hence my question:
The movement here is a bit complicated, maybe even too complex to animate in Onshape?

I did however try conceptualizing and maybe implementing using this example:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/eb014ae849908dd1567b654c/w/ac8e8094f75706347ddea16d/e/ea97c3a384c30531e46e0a8e
But there are going to be a lot more moving parts in the future I plan on making that are going to have one big interconnected movement 
If there are any other examples related to what I'm working with I'm happy to learn them.

Thanks in advance,

MichaelPascoe

It is much easier if you simply want to drag the chain manually. You can have a sketch with a single spline where each chain link is tangent to. Then you should be able to drag the chain along. But this will not really be able to animate. This way is easy to over-constrain and Onshape will throw a mate error.

Maybe @john_mcclary can work his Rubix Cube magic and find a good solution for animating chains?

Matt_Shields

With enough work, you can animate just about anything.

https://youtu.be/SMTeEhbCPzo

MichaelPascoe

Currently there are only a few ways to animate complex chains and each requires a bit of hand waving. Here is one way to get the animation to work:

• The chain needs to travel at least one link
• Set the animation to loop
• Set the animation start and stop to line up with your sprocket ratio
• Set the speed to be fast (around 7 steps or so) to make it appear seamless. For this to really be seamless you would need to use a tangent path guide, however I wanted to stick with actual links for this studio

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/713f282c6a0c9a8e90b0ac19/w/f72fa6bbdf5cfa0f320837b5/e/472428fc9d95e354784d8a24?renderMode=0&uiState=63b44df015b392361559d1f6

MichaelPascoe

It is much easier if you simply want to drag the chain manually. You can have a sketch with a single spline where each chain link is tangent to. Then you should be able to drag the chain along. But this will not really be able to animate. This way is easy to over-constrain and Onshape will throw a mate error.

Maybe @john_mcclary can work his Rubix Cube magic and find a good solution for animating chains?

lawrence_tang288

Interesting, I'll see how all these work.
Thanks!