When it comes to your assemblies, one of the most important things is to be able to convey the big picture idea. This mostly means showing how it is put together and how it functions. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create an explode animation. But creating complete explode animations in SOLIDWORKS can sometimes be time-consuming and frustratingly tedious. With SOLIDWORKS Composer, creating a complex explode animation is super easy. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, Application Engineer Mike Souders shows us how.

Steps to Create an Explode Animation

With some a basic timeline keyframe workflow, you can create an extremely complicated explode animation in no time at all. Just remember this five-step process:

• Position the timeline at the desired time
• Select the components
• Add a location key
• Set the camera orientation
• Add a camera key

With those five steps, you’ll be able to make complicated and insightful explode animations. What makes this possible is the rag and drop behavior of the components in SOLIDWORKS Composer. Just click on the components and drag them in any direction to begin the explode operation. To change the orientation of the camera, simply rotate the view orientation and zoom in or out to fit your model just right and add a camera view. But these are just the basic steps to create an explode animation, there are some tools in SOLIDWORKS Composer that can help take your explode animations to the next level.

To create some next level explode views, you can leverage linear, spherical, or cylindrical explode tools found in the Transform Ribbon of SOLIDWORKS Composer. These tools have the capability to explode multiple components or even your entire assembly in just one step.

As you can see, SOLIDWORKS Composer has a lot of great tools ready for you to use to create complex explode animations to share some insight about your assemblies.

Ready to learn more about SOLIDWORKS Composer? Click the button below to watch our On-Demand Webinar “Get to Know SOLIDWORKS Composer”