IPA Pro

Has anyone used IPA Pro for doing animations from Pro/E? Looking for feed back on quality of animations and ease of use/learning curve. Are all constrains kept between pro/e and IPA? Is complex motion possible, ie like a bicycle wheel spinning at one speed as the gears and pedals spin at another speed.

Would you recommend another package?

Thanks!

I used IPA about 3 years ago to animate a three bar linkage. Without the animation it would have taken me forever to figure out how the system would move. IPA was very easy to learn. I remember the most time consuming thing being stripping the model down to the bare essentials to get everything running. I beleive that the constraints are maintained between ProE and IPA. A very powerful tool for presentations to less technical people. The best thing for you to do is download an evaluation copy from the web site.

I used IPA to animate a variety of different Pro/E assemblies. IPA's great for creating simple animations - it's easy to learn (after a bit of time getting used to the features). It doesn't actually take any of the mates or aligns from Pro/E, although it does maintain assembly tree relations - keeping children with their parent. You have to define paths for parts or assemblies & orchestrate the movements on a schedule. It's not like Mechanism where you can create connections & drivers...

As dflockton mentioned about time-consuming steps, it's better to remove anything you don't want in the animation before you export it from Pro/E.

You can add cameras, lights, etc & move them as you would parts... (and create web pages)



All in all, a great package to use.

Ed