Assembly trick with a Lamborghini

To visualize an assembly of several components, you can:

• pack your components into a container, and set their location at the right spot of the assembly part
• join the components, and change the 3D shape of the reference item which visually appears as the assembly of the components

Here is a third possibility used in this post:

• create a flowitem which already contains all the components, but the components are initially hidden and then shown one after each other to give the appearance of an assembly process

Let's take an example with the assembly of a Lamborghini. Here is how the Lamborghini looks like in the FlowItem Bin:



... and behind the scene, in the tree view:



The Lamborghini object has no shape, and all the components are in the node >visual/drawsurrogate.

So now let's use this Lamborghini flowitem in a very simple model (attached model: Lamborghini Assembly Line.fsm): 1 Source, 1 Conveyor, 1 Sink.



There is some code (less than 50 lines) in 3 triggers:

• Source, trigger OnReset: set color & hide all components
• Conveyor, trigger OnEntry: send a message to show the first component
• Conveyor, trigger OnMessage: show a component & send a delayed message to show the next component

Once your flowitem is built with all the components in the node drawsurrogate, you can use this trick anywhere: on a Processor, a Combiner...

Reset & run the model to build your own Lamborghini !



Credits

• The 3D Lamborghini used in this model was downloaded on the Trimble 3D warehouse (http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehou...a&prevstart=12)
• To make the parts of the skp Lamborghini show the FlexSim color, the method used is described in a previous post (https://www.flexsim.com/community/fo...ketchup+remove)

Are these attachments still available? Thanks

Thanks for the heads up.

I uploaded an updated version of the model for FlexSim 7.3.6.