Using Motion Animations in Navisworks Clash Detection

By Chris Smith

Introduction

Following on from my last blog where we looked at creating clash studies, we can also create movement animations that can be included in our clash study. This allows us to simulate real life events over a time period, effectively creating multiple studies within one single test.

Animation

This blog will be focusing on the clash detective so I will not go into a lot of detail regarding animation. That said however, to create a motion animation you will need the animator tool open. This can be found on the Tools Tab in the Home Ribbon.

Once in the animator, you will need to create a scene and some animation sets for the objects you will be moving. Use the move and rotate tools in the animator to move the objects, add a keyframe and move the timeline to the next move point. Once your animation is complete it will look something like this.

Clash detection

Now we have our animation we can follow the steps in the previous blog to create a clash study. The difference in this study will be in the settings for the study.

Link

You can see in the image below we have a “link” option and here is where I can select any available animations to link to the clash study.

Steps

There is a Step option in seconds. This option is how often a clash study will be run throughout the animation. My animation is roughly 1 minute long, so using the link option at 0.1 second intervals will give me approximately 600 studies.

Type

Type will allow the user to define tolerances for the study. In the image above you can see that I have set the type to Hard contact with a tolerance of 0.050m (50cm).

Results

Running the test will start the study and will display any issues the same as a static test. This is because each test is effectively many single static tests. I didn’t change the layout from the previous study so that we can see a clash between the building and the machinery.

The animation I created moved the forklift and the CNC unit from the outside of the building which means that there are no clashes with the machinery up to that point and therefore can be installed without any additional requirements.

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