Loop an Animation

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question

Jonathan asked Aug 6, '22 Felix Möhlmann edited Aug 8, '22

Loop an Animation

I want an operator to loop the UseTablet animation for the duration of the time they're processing at a machine.
Thus far I've created a Person Flow with a triggered source on process start. Custom code starts the animation and then a Decide is supposed to determine whether or not the animation is still running (simply spamming the start animation interrupts and restarts the animation so that is visually unappealing). If the animation is not running then loop back to the animation start code, otherwise send the token to a sink.

The problem I'm having with this approach is finding the appropriate value to check to determine if the person is still running the animation.

This:

Model.find("InsertOperator3").find(">visual/animationinfo/animations").value == "UseTablet"

doesn't work because there's no data in that '.value'

Am I on the right track? Is there a better way? If I want to use this flow (once working) on other operators, how do I do that?

Here's a screenshot of my flow. The delays off the Decide are only there for debugging to see where my token is going:

Software Version:

FlexSim 22.1.1

animations person flow

1659792789503.png (20.3 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2022-08-07T11:17:29Z

Felix Möhlmann answered Aug 7, '22

You can specify how fast the animation should run and how often it is repeated directly in the start() command. To have the animation repeat indefinitely until stopped you'd use REPEAT_TYPE_TIME_AFTER_END as the repeatType and 0 as the repeatValue.

An easy to use the flow for multiple operators is to add them all to a group. This allows you to listen for an event on all members of the groups at once in the event-triggered source. With the 'Assign Event Object To' field, you can get a reference to the object on which the event fired and use it later in the flow to refer to the correct operator.

1659871046561.png (20.0 KiB)

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Answer 2 · 2022-08-08T13:37:45Z

Jonathan answered Aug 8, '22 Felix Möhlmann edited Aug 8, '22

I added an onEntry trigger to my machine to start the animation. But I can't get the animation to repeat using:

{ // ************* PickOption Start ************* //

/***popup:StartStopAnimation*/

/***tag:title*//**Start Animation*/

if (/** \nCondition: *//***tag:condition*//**/true/**/) {

Object object = /** \nObject: *//***tag:object*//**/current.centerObjects[1]/**/;

object.animations[/** \nAnimation: *//***tag:animation*//**/"UseTablet"/**/].start(0,0,REPEAT_TYPE_TIME_AFTER_END,0);

}

} // ******* PickOption End ******* //

What am I doing wrong? There's no examples of this.

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Felix Möhlmann commented · Aug 08, 2022 at 02:01 PM

That's weird, this works fine on my end.

Just to be sure; did you 'Apply' the changes to the code before you ran the model again after adding the parameters to the code?

Do you maybe start the animation a second time at some other point in your model without the repeat type set?

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Jonathan Felix Möhlmann commented · Aug 08, 2022 at 05:28 PM

There it goes. Now it's working. I'd applied the changes but it didn't do it the first time. Strange. But it's working now. Thank you.

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Felix Möhlmann Jonathan commented · Aug 08, 2022 at 06:12 PM

Yes, I tried that exact scenario. The source only creates a single item (a different source creates more to keep the clock going). And the operator is still doing the animation over 300s later.

Does the animation just stop in your model or does the operator go back to a different animation (walk or idle)?

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