If you make products that have moving parts, chances are you want to see them in action. You may also need to know kinematic properties, such as displacements, velocities, accelerations, and even collisions.

Animation Designer in NX CAD will do just that.

NX Animation Designer

The NX Animation Designer will allow you to:

• perform kinematic studies,
• create conceptual designs and run analyses,
• run 2D free body motion (sketches) studies, assemblies, or multi-body part files,
• map assembly constraints to Animation Designer joints (or add joints manually),
• solve for the collision of multiple parts,
• and graph motion parameters.

Example: Animation Designer

Below, you can see a sample of what the Animation Designer tab looks like.

The assembly use in the sample below already has built-in assembly constraints.

If you went in and moved parts, like in a typical NX Assembly, you’d be able to rotate the crank shaft and make the piston move up and down.

Animation Designer with Assembly Constraints

With the assembly constraints already in place, you can use the Joints from Assembly Constraints command to analyze the assembly constraints to understand the kinds of tools needed in the Animation Designer. You can see this below.

Based on this, the Animation Designer will create the necessary Rigid Groups, Joints, Couplers, and Motors. You can see what each of these are, listed off to the left on your screen.

To actually animate the motor, you need to use the Position Motor command to describe how the motor is going to move based on position or the Speed Motor command to describe how the motor is going to move based on speed. Below is an example of the Speed Motor command.

With this command, you can grab specific joints (see image below for the arrows that indicate motion) and determine the speed. This will apply a motor to a particular joint. All you have to do, then, is press Play and watch the movement.

If you enter a negative value for the speed, you can reverse the direction of the movement.

Animation Designer Without Assembly Constraints

If you have an assembly without assembly constraints (you haven’t used the Joints from Assembly Constraints command), you can use the Joint command (window pictured below) to select the joint types.

Want to watch NX Animation Designer in action? Take a look at this video.

Interested in learning more about NX CAD? We offer NX CAD Training classes, and you can peruse our library of NX CAD videos on YouTube.