When you have finished designing bends, you can animate the results to simulate visually the folding and unfolding of the bend. With Bend Animation, you specify a static face, the number of animation cycles, and the angle between each step in the animation.
The following figure shows an example of a bend animation.
Bend animation does not work for offsets.
To animate a bend,
1. Click Sheet Metal and then, in the Post Process group, click Bend Anim. The Bend Animation dialog box opens and prompts you to select a bend to animate.
2. Click a bend of your sheet metal part, or use the Select tool to select multiple bends. Creo Elements/Direct Sheet Metal highlights the bends you have clicked. Creo Elements/Direct Sheet Metal automatically detects the static face of the sheet (the Base Face which is to be held while the other parts of the sheet are folded and unfolded during the animation).
3. Optionally, specify an alternative Base Face.
4. Creo Elements/Direct Sheet Metal selects defaults for the animation settings, but you can change these if desired:
◦ Cycles: The number of times you want to repeat the complete animation cycle. If you do not specify the cycles, the animation continues till you click Stop.
◦ Delta Angle: The difference in fold/unfold angle between each successive step of the animation. The total number of steps, therefore, will be the bend angle divided by the delta angle.
◦ Rot Angle: The angle of rotation of the sheet during the specified cycles. If no cycles are specified, this is the angle by which the sheet rotates during each cycle.
5. Select whether the animation should go forward and reverse (Fwd + Rev) or just Reverse (with a jump back to the start) by clicking the relevant switch on.
A Reverse cycle is unfolded to folded, whereas a Fwd + Rev cycle is folded to unfolded to folded again.
6. To start the animation, click Start.
To step through the animation,
If you want to study the bend unfolding more carefully (or take screen shots, for example), you can step through it one frame at a time in either direction. You must have clicked Start at least once to define the animation before you can go through it stepwise. Control the stepping tools as follows:
• To step through the animation in the folding direction, click Step Fwd.
• To step through the animation in the unfolding direction, click Step Bwd.
• You can return to the first frame of the animation at any time by clicking Reset.
When you have finished viewing the animated bend, click .
To save the animation as an AVI file,
1. Open the Save AVI area of the Bend Animation dialog box.
2. Click the Filename check box and type a path and filename.
3. If required, select values for Screen Size, Frames/Sec, or Codec, using the boxes. Adjust the compression percentage using the slider.
4. Click Start to display the animation and save the AVI file.
Bend Anim. The Bend Animation dialog box opens and prompts you to select a bend to animate.
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