Controlling animation length. How?

[AdrianHomutescu]

Strange problem and as annoying as it sounds simple. I made an animation of a bent bear cap that oscillates until it reaches its equillibrium state. As it oscillates on a table, the camera moves around to show most of the detail.


That is OK. When opening the resulting mpg with a player, I am able to notice the length of the animation, in seconds. For different animations, that should stretch in time (in order to look good) 12 seconds, I get animations of 5 or 6 seconds or so. I set in Pro the animation to 12, 13, 14 or 15 steps (I do not know the value in real time, that's the thing!), and the frame rate is also OK. I used 15 and 20 frames per step, but the frame rate does not seem to influence consistently the actual animation length (mpg time, in seconds). I also obtained some longer animations, over to 9 seconds, but I cannot find the connection between Pro/E animation time and actual, real time of mpg playback.


How do I impose the real animation time, in seconds??? I searched the menus and found nothing of the kind. I'm using Wildfire, by the way. It's quite frustrating to let the computer run for hours,and afterwardsobtain a crystal clear animation yet onethat runs like hell, with the speed of a train!


Yes, I know it's stupid, thus teasing me twice because I know it's so. A great drawback for Pro if the animation time is so dubiously controlable.


Any help would be greatly appreciated. And thanks for reading.


Adrian Homutescu

View attachment 943

 

[shotokyu]

Adrian,


If I understand correctly you want the animation to go longer than the 10 second default. If this is the case, while in the animation aplication look under the "Tools" pull down menu and select "Time Domain". This dialog box will allow you to change the overall time.


Hope this helps.

 

[shotokyu]

Adrian,


One further comment: The actual time of an MPEG movie made by Pro/E seems to be the (Number of Frames) / (Frame Rate Chosen when making the movie 25,30, or 50).


The Number of Frames can be chosen in the Animation Time Domain dialog box. Here you can choose any 2 of the following which will dictate your Number of Frames: 1) # of Frames, 2) Rate, 3) End Time.

 

[AdrianHomutescu]

Thank you Shotokyu for your suggestion, and please excuse my replying so late (I went on vacation

!)


I was aware of the time domain and of the total number of frames to be rendered inside an animation. Still, my interpretation of the frame rate chosen when selecting capture and so long is different. You know the frame rate of a movie downloaded through LAN, right? (not talking about DVD's or other legal copies) They have a frame rate of about 20 or 25 per second. The same for a shooter games, be it Quake 3 or GTA San Andreas. If you video card cannot manage more than 25 (at least) different frames each second, soon your eyes and head will hurt and you will miss most of the fun. The visual comfort increases along this frame rate, and so it's the case, in my opinion, with the Pro animation capture. If you render the same stuff with different frame rates (25. 30 or 50), you will see the size of the resulting mpg increasing along the selected FR.


Just to check everything, I experimented 2 cases of the same animation of time = 15.


1. So, I first took an internal FR of 10, that resulted in a total of 150 animated frames and captured it witha 25 FR option. The result should have been, accordingly to your supposition, 150/25=6 seconds long. Well, Windows Media Player reported 5 seconds of animation. Pretty close, right?


2. The second time, I changed the internal FR to 20 in the same 15 times. I took the capture with a FR of 30, in order to allegedly obtain a result of 15*20/30=10 actual seconds of animation. Well, the result proved to be as unpredictable and inconvenient as I first complained. Instead of 10 seconds, I got 4 lousy seconds of animation (Windows Media Player report)! So actually everything went faster the second time.


I appreciate your interest in the matter and your well intended reply. If anything new comes to your attention, I'd be glad to share it. Until then, I repeat myself maybe, this is a great downside for Pro if there is no rational way to do it right.


Adrian

 

[skwasim_smile]

hi Adrian Homutescu





I was really impressed by ur bent bear cap model can u plz send me the details about the creation of this model if u send me the pics of how to construct the model i would be very thankful to u waitin for ur response on [email protected]


bye

 

[AdrianHomutescu]

Hi Skwasim!


I hope the few lines I'll drop below would be of help.


A beer cap is nothing but small foil of tin so there is practically impossible to conceive such a design outside the Sheetmetal module! That's the first hint that is most preciousfor thosetrying to obtain something close to reality.


The second thing is: do not try to build anything in already bent posture. So, if it's a cap, first do a normal one.


How to start? Open a sheetmetal part and build a first wall as revolved, in the simplest manner. To replicate the teeth on the outer cap rim you must replicate the technical process they are obtained through. Pro has a powerful sheetmetal function called Form. The downside of it is that you have to have, previously modelled, the part that struck the blank in order to get it wavy. Chose Form, then Punchthen browse for that part. The part will pop up in your window and you will be able to "assemble" it over your blank, just as you in the picture:


View attachment 1153


Take care that the blank not cover the entire punch, instead it must roll over and fold over it still not entirely. The result will depend greatly on how well and accurate you design the punch part: knowing the geometry of the actual punching devices would be of great help - still, in my case, I had to reverse engineer it!


Yes, is that simple! And that difficult also, as not every geometry and placement for the blank and the punch result in a valid function.


Once we have the cap, let's bend it. Go to Insert/Warp. Pick the Bend tool icon in the lower bar. Select a convenient axis about which to warp your part.


That's about it. Know that it's a great time eating effort to achieve visual resemblance... and you'll even get angry now and then. Still, good luck.


Adrian