best tool for powerplant animation

[baskerville]

Hello Everybody!
that´s my first post here. I´m from Italy and sorry for the mistakes in english..

Me and some other crazy friends want to start a project. We want to model in 3d different power plants, starting from the renewable energy powered.. The big challenge would be to model every kind of powerplants..but let´s fly down..

My question is simple: what is the best tool (or combination of tools) to this purpose????

consider this:
we want technical details for the mechanical parts (like turbines and so on..). We also want to manage buildings and other external structures. At the and we want to integrate both in a very nice animation with high visual impact!

candidates:

Inventor
Solidworks
3d Studio MAX
Autodesk Viz
CATIA

My idea: Inventor + 3Ds MAX.

Reason: they are better integrable (all are from Autodesk).

second question: what about the educational licence for the tools above mentioned?

Comments / suggestions are welcome!!!!!!

thank you very much!!!!!

baskerville

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PS: do you know what it is???

[negfrequency]

Well it sounds like your going for more of an architectual deseign rather than engineering. I guess i'd go with autodesk revit which is specifically for the task. I dont think it can handle the turbines though. Does anyone know if you can import models between revit and inventor?

[baskerville]

Originally Posted by negfrequency

Well it sounds like your going for more of an architectual deseign rather than engineering.

hi neg, thank you for your post,

my idea is:
the external views should be the starting point to ensure a "cinematographic effect" and move the camera form the outside to the inside..
here I would like to show ("inventor 11 like") the details of turbines, biomoass combustion reactor, wind turbines, marine current turbines ..

as an example imagine to start from the picture I posted above
and then move with the camera across the structure. Here a sequence of pictures I catched with google to show what I think





and imagine the last model to be done in inventor 11..

Question: it is possible to animate a 3d model with inventor (i.e. a turbine) ??

Thank you so much!!

[petek]

Yes, you can animate a turbine using Inventor. It's a very simple task to rotate a component, and not much more work to include a gear train to a generator.

I think 3DS would be the way to go to illustrate non-solid components (fluid flow, moving arrows, etc.). I'm not an expert in this, but I don't think you can import Inventor constraint-driven animation into 3DS - just the static models, which you could then animate in 3DS.

[baskerville]

Originally Posted by petek

Yes, you can animate a turbine using Inventor. It's a very simple task to rotate a component, and not much more work to include a gear train to a generator.

I think 3DS would be the way to go to illustrate non-solid components (fluid flow, moving arrows, etc.). I'm not an expert in this, but I don't think you can import Inventor constraint-driven animation into 3DS - just the static models, which you could then animate in 3DS.

thank you very much Petek!
ciao! baskerville

[baskerville]

By the way, if someone is interested in collaborating with me for the PP-project please contact me at:

zasaconsulting@gmail.com



See you
Baskerville

visit my blog: http://progressorb.blogspot.com/
(some nice 3ds pics are there)