Its Friday but Beta’s a-comin’
Is it really that time already? I just finished writing the 2011 books, and now it may be time to do it again. Whether you participate for the prizes, to have a shot at improving the software, out of a desire to improve your own knowledge, get a jump on what your company needs to do to upgrade, out of curiosity, or just because you can’t help yourself, get ready for the SolidWorks 2012 beta, set to begin on June 27.
So rev up your spare time, and let’s start testing!
Is there much of a performance difference in the new Animator/MotionManager? I’ve done some extensive animations using Animator up to v2007, and I really am frustrated with the bugs and limited capacity to animate things.
For instance, editing an animation really doesn’t work most of the time, but randomly throws my assembly into red-diamond hell without reason. So if I don’t program the animation perfectly the first time, I have to start over. Sometimes it hoses itself when rendering, such as forgetting to render the decals–I have no idea why, since in the next pass it will do fine.
It seems the motion behavior of parts is totally different (with a different, hidden set of rules) than typical motion within the SolidWorks viewport. This drives me nuts. I set up the mates to limit motion to specific ranges, but Animator doesn’t work that way and can really screw up the assembly. Lots of secret rules to figure out. If I can get a reliable range of motion among parts when dragging a given part in the assembly, programming the motion of that same part in Animator ought to produce the same results–but rarely does.
I guess I’m wondering if the new versions (v2008 and v2009) have enhanced things at all. If so, this would be a great reason for me to upgrade.