CAT Jack Stand

The CAT Jack Stand product demonstration was a project I worked on during summer of 2020 as I assisted the product development department of Alltrade Tools LLC. Alltrade focuses on power tools, automotive tools, and home appliances. In order to provide content for their online sales, they traditionally filmed live demonstration videos of their products and posted them under the product description. However, the department wanted to try animating a virtual product demonstration in order to supplement the live demonstrations that they already film. Each form of demonstration presents its own inherent advantages and shortcomings, though I will not discuss them here. Regardless of the tradeoffs, having both present for a customer will enhance their shopping experience. I was tasked with creating an animated demonstration for one of their top selling products: the CAT Jack Stand.

For clarification, I am not the one designing the mechanical systems of the actual Jack Stand. The wonderfully qualified people of the CAT and Alltrade R&D department are responsible for the engineering aspect. There are too many risks involving safety and liability when it comes to designing a tool that will hold a car up while a person crawls underneath the vehicle. My responsibility was to use their CAD models to create an animated tour/demo of the product that displayed all the requested features. I was given free reign for how I wanted to complete this project as nobody else in the company had much experience with animating 3-D models. Since all of Alltrade’s models are made using Solidworks, I defaulted to using Solidwork’s motion study feature to complete the animation. I will keep this post short and sweet. Outlined below are the steps I took to complete this project. Attached at the end of the post is the full detailed documentation for my methodology. I wrote this documentation in order to guide Alltrade’s product team through any future animations they wanted to create on their own using Solidworks.

Step 1: I was given individual part models for the CAT Jack Stand. Alltrade’s R&D department did have a fully mated assembly for the jack, but due to a difference in Solidworks versions (I had Solidworks 2020 but the assembly was in Solidworks 2019), I was only able to import the individual components and thus needed to mate all the components together again before I began animating. There are upwards of 30 individual components for the jack, which was too much to mate intuitively, so I hopped over to the R&D warehouse and grabbed myself one of the physical jacks and played around with it. Once I was confident in my understanding of the mechanical systems behind the Jack, I began mating the components.

Step 2: Once mates were complete, I needed to assign each component in the assembly with a color and a material. This was necessary in order to make the rendered view of the product look as close to the real thing as possible. This, however, was not as easy as just reading the bill of materials/RGB key and assigning values. Unfortunately Solidworks PhotoView360 (the rendering add-in) does not always accurately reflect the physical appearance of a material. I had to experiment with different materials, surface textures, virtual light placement, and much more in order to get a visual render I liked. I can compare the process to a photoshoot of a celeb, where I adjusted lighting and applied makeup to the object at the center of attention until it looked picture perfect.

Step 3: Next, I needed to create the motion study. A motion study is essentially simulated motion of the Solidworks component or assembly under applied conditions (such as gravity and an external force). The motion study can also accommodate exploded views and camera adjustments such as rotation, panning, and zooming. Creating a motion study is comparable to very crude animation. While the people at Pixar are rendering many frames per second and adjusting the intricate models very slightly between frames, I am doing the same, just on a much less precise level. At each individual timestamp, I set the initial and final position of the object and Solidworks will automatically generate a uniform transition, resulting in animated motion. The motion study came in handy when I had to animate the operation of the ratcheting system, which involves many components simultaneously moving under interrelated constraints.

Step 4: The final step was infuriatingly difficult to complete. Simply put, the final step was to render and process the final animation. Evidently, Solidworks is not primarily an animation software. Therefore, rendering took a painfully long amount of time to complete, especially given the framerate I chose to render at. A full render would take upwards of 24 hours. In fact, due to reasons still unknown, I was constantly running into issues mid-render. I would leave my computer rendering overnight and when I checked the rendered product the next morning, it would glitch out at after a certain time (usually 30 seconds in). After finally identifying this problem, I decided the only way to fix it is to splice my existing animation into < 30 second sections and splice them together in post-render processing. There were many more issues that I ran into which took me a whole week to bypass, and I will likewise bypass on discussing them. I can only assume that the errors in rendering arise from some disconnect between Solidworks motion study and the PhotoView360 add-in. Nonetheless, enjoy my final product!