Uploaded September 2016 | Updated September 2026, 34 minutes ago

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Dear Engineers,

Welcome to my video explaining how you can animate CAD Assemblies in MATLAB via Solidworks.

What's covered in this video
1) Creating 3D CAD Assembly in Solidworks
2) Exporting to VRML/STL while keeping constraints
3) Scanning the assembly into MATLAB
4) Motion for the whole assembly as well as individual components.

You will need:
1) Simscape Multibody (The MATLAB Forum has an excellent tutorial on installing this.)
2) Solidworks
3) MATLAB (with Simulink 3D Animation)

NOTE: This is NOT a tutorial on SimMechanics. This is Simulink 3D Animation. It is a lot more robust and is used mainly for long distance motion. SimMechanics is for mainly modeling systems which do not move, however there is internal motion.

Simulink 3D Animation is used for modeling and simulation of launch vehicles, ground vehicles, and more. Equations of motion need not be known, and control laws are also defined.

Most of Simulink 3D Animation features can NOT be used in SimMechanics, such as creating custom worlds, hypersonic motion, etc.


The video which explains VRML in more detail is here:
youtube.com/watch?v=--9d8jYzLpg