I am wondering if it is possible in sketchup to achieve an exploded view animation such as the you tube video below:
I am going to start practicing assembly drawings in LO soon with a 10 piece part(keep it simple haha) but was wondering if SU could do that animation… if not, thats ok becasue a machinist doesnt need to see it haha. Just wanted to know if it could be done:)
On a side note, i have decided to undertake a project. Im making a small, 10 chapter video series for engineering students wanting to learn the basics and intermediate stuff of sketchup geared toward engineering principles, and design. threads, gears, working drawings, solids, 3d printing, piping(MAYBE),etc, etc.
On a side question, whats best practice for assembly views? Ie, if i have a box with a lif, hinges, screws etc. Is there a fast way to set up the assembly or is manually moving the parts the best way?
For assembly or exploded views, I find manually moving the components is the best way. There’s too many decisions to make about exactly where parts need to go so they can be seen for an extension to be able to sort it out.
i see what you are saying. Out of curiosity, how many parts does one of your chair plans have? I once saw an exploded view of that and it was very well organized.
As mentioned here, Fredo’s animator would be the best candidate.
I would also say that exploding the model yourself, while a little more time consuming is the best thing to do. as you can precisely align items like bolts to slide into a hole etc.and know where parts start and end.
Fredo’s animator does have an explode function but it explodes everything from the center, so parts will overlap and pass through each other.
No I don’t use the Wudworx, I probably would find it useful though.
If you want to animate something then Fredo Animator will do all sorts of movements. It’s capable of pretty much anything for showing how to assemble something for video export.
But then your question swung to exploded views, slightly different. For that a bit of manual labour is probably the best way. There is a paid extension I know of at Smustard that does exploded views. It’s an old resource so I don’t know if it would be compatible with latest versions of SU. But anyway, I don’t think the result would be exactly what you want.
As another example of using @Fredo6’s Animator extension, here is a test sequence I created for a personal project; the movement was manually specified:
The above clip is part of an ~18 minute video that uses Animator extensively, along with two uses of MSPhysics:
@lt72884 Yes, I have been modeling the Mars '75 Viking lander as a personal project (for the past five and a half years at this point). Here is a view from a month ago of its recent overall state. Most of the large and prominent external components are yet to be modeled. All the 1000 or so unique components are solid in the SketchUp sense.
Please feel free. FYI, the work-in-progress .SKP model file itself is available on DropBox (I can’t recall if this file was saved as 2016 or 2018 format):
And here is an album of 2D renderings I’ve been accumulating during the construction process:
