For those who are not familiar. Solidoworks has a feature which allows you to explode an assembly then animate it. Does Keyshot have the link with solidworks to import that animation of the model?
Unfortunately you can't import the animation.
Let me ask another question. How do I got about animating this and linking the parts with each other and having them interact?
You will need to apply the same animation to multiple parts.
so for each part I cant link or do any connection whatsoever everything has to be moved manually. You guys should looking into importing mates or having some type of links and connections you can ad to parts during animation. This would be a lot easier to animate in 3DS max
Not necessarily. You can copy and paste animations from one part to a number of other parts, or even entire subassemblies.
the main issue would be the controls for the main blade. It would be easy to apply a rotation animation to whole blade assembly but the controls one moves so do 4-5 other parts in different directions without some type of link or mates or follow constrains this would be very very trick to animate.
Animations involving kinematic chains and inverse kinematics are indeed quite hard to achieve in KeyShot without imported animations.
A few months ago, I tried animating a robotic arm (glue dispensing SCARA robot with a specific trajectory of the glue nozzle) from scratch. I gave up...
However, I wouldn't want to juggle assembly constraints inside KeyShot. It would become pretty messy, I imagine. KeyShot is not a CAD tool. :)
Dries
When you analyze the basic motions that make up almost all mechanical kinematics and motion, they break down to just rotative and linear. If KeyShot could import and recognize just those two mates that we set up in CAD, it would put KeyShot in a league by itself.
Take for example a six-cylinder in-line engine. There are only 20 rotative mates (crank @ 8, rods > crank @ 6 and rod > piston @ 6) and six linear mates, one for each piston. In SolidWorks, for example, once you have mated things up, you can simply cursor-rotate the crank to visualize the motion, or apply a "motor" to the crank to auto-loop it.
Things like a chain drive around two sprockets of different pitch would be almost impossible in KS, but in reality, that's almost never needed.
I'm really pushing for mate recognition as the next big advance for KeyShot! Not only for animation, but for simple re-positioning when setting up a render, just like we can now move and rotate parts and assemblies with the widget- but with mate constraints imported from native CAD.
Bill G
I think solidworks has figured it out better than anyone. I did once an animation of V8 engine in 3ds max very complex a lot of rigging and linking parts and looks constraints and dummies linked to center of parts and followers etc etc. While in solidworks you apply concentric and coincident mates then animation is no hassle. If Keyshot is able to preserve and import the mates from solidworks than animation in Keyshot will be simple.