Search for ideas on how to make belts ...

[Jake M]

My team captain asked me the other day if I could make belts in Autodesk. I thought about it and I don't really know how I would go about that, unless I just designed it to be stationary and not to rotate with the rest of the assembly. That should work fine, but I was wondering if anyone else might have a different idea.

[pmax]

Hi Folks,

Take a look at Design Accelerators. They can assist with all kinds of functional components, such as belts, gears, bolted connections, and the like.

Take a look at these demonstrations:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...112&id=7218463

-Pete
Autodesk

[=Martin=Taylor=]

As far as I can tell the Autodesk design accelerator can make a belt but actually getting it to turn sounds REALLY challenging .

If for instance, you had a pattern (3D or 2D) on your belt you would want that pattern to bend in relation to the belt and it's pulleys.

How would you do this? Well if I were you I wouldn't bother....

Why do you want the belt to actually move anyways? (or am I missing the point of what you are trying to do).

[Morgan Gillespie]

Ironically it is very easy to make belts/treads/chains in Autodesk 3dsm. Animate them too with a click of the mouse.

[negfrequency]

ive actually been recently playing around with the chains, and i think ive got it down. I make a normal chain with constrained links(thankyou imates!) then i extrude a surface, throw it in as a part, where i add a transitional constraint as well as tangent, and the belt rotates just as it would in real life in a circle. It is quite incredible.

[Jake M]

Hmm. I'm not sure I understand you exactly, neg, and I'm not too familiar with transisional constraints. In any case, I wasn't really expecting much, but I figured I should ask anyway. I'll just make it unmoving for now. It doesn't really make much difference, but it would be cool.

[negfrequency]

alright i admit that explanation was rather lame.

transitional constraints allow an object to roll or follow a surface, kind of like how you shift from second to third in a standard car. The stick being one object, the track being the other.

by creating a chain, you are making several pieces that can bend on only one plane. constraining this chain to an extruded suface shaped similar to a belt with transitional constraints allows this chain to "roll" along the surface in a continual circle.

As far as i can tell, the large downside of this is the actual construction of the chain itself. Even with iMates, the file size can get annoyingly large and laggy if you dont have an average computer (yea mines below average).

if i get the chance, i will post a picture of this sometime.

[Jake M]

Ahh, that puts things into perspective a bit more. Do you have to constrain each link to the spool individually, or can you include all their inside faces like a single face or something along that line?

[negfrequency]

i constrained like one every three, and it was enough without having to do more of them.

[Jake M]

Hmm. I'll play around with that for a while then. Thanks.

[Eric Scheuing]

We asked the same thing during the season, and all the replies we got didn't help at all.

There is nothing for belts on Design Accelerator. If you aren't going to be animating it, just get the dimensions and extrude it. That's what we did