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The Run Animation activity can trigger an animation on a 3D object in the simulation model. You can use any of the animations that come pre-programmed with the standard FlexSim objects or you can create your own custom animations. If desired, you can have the token wait in the Run Animation activity until the animation completes. This can be useful for syncing. See the Animation Creator for more information about creating custom animations.

Connectors

The Run Animation activity only allows one connector out. See Adding and Connecting Activities for more information.

Properties

The following image shows properties for the Run Animation activity:

Each of these properties will be explained in the following sections.

• Name You can change the name of the activity using the Name box. See Name for more information about this property.
• Font The Font button opens a window to edit the activity's background color and font properties. See Font for more information about this property.
• Statistics The Statistics button opens the activity's statistics window. See Statistics for more information about this property.
• Object(s) Use the Object(s) property to select the object that will be animated. To run animations on multiple objects at the same time, you can pass a treenodearray of objects into this property. Alternatively, you can create a group of the objects you want to animate. (See Groups for more information about creating groups of objects.) To reference a group in the Object(s) property, click the pull-down menu next to this property and select Groups to see a list of all the groups that have been created for this simulation model (or type Group: groupName directly into the box).
• Animation Use the Animation property to determine which animation on the object should be run. This should be either a number that is the index of the animation or a string that is the name of the animation on the object.

  To view the animations that are available for any 3D object:

  1. Right-click on the object in the 3D model to open a menu.
  2. Select Edit then Animations to open the Animation Creator.
  3. On the bottom panel, look for the Animation menu. Click the arrow on this menu to open the full list of the currently available animations.

  You can either type the name of the animation or its index number. The index number is the order in which the animation appears in the Animation menu. For example, an Operator object has three animations (listed in this order): Walk, WalkLoaded, and Stand. The Walk animation would be index 1, WalkLoaded would be index 2, and so forth. If entering the name of the animation directly, be sure to put quotes around the name so the Universal Edit will recognize it as a string. For example, "WalkLoaded".

• Wait Until Complete If checked the token will remain in the Run Animation activity until the animation is finished. Repeat Indefinitely If you cause the token to wait until the animation is complete, the animation's Repeat Type must be set to Do Not Repeat or Repeat Set Number. Otherwise the animation will loop continuously and the token will never exit the Run Animation activity.

  To check or change an animation's Repeat Type setting:

  1. Right-click on the object in the 3D model to open a menu.
  2. Select Edit then Animations to open the Animation Creator.
  3. Select the desired animation from the Animations and Components pane.
  4. In Quick Properties, look for the Repeat Type menu.
  5. Click the menu and select Do Not Repeat or Repeat Set Number. If you selected the latter option, make sure you indicate how many times the animation should be repeated in the Repeat Value box.