The mate controller is an ideal tool to showcase SolidWorks Assembly's intended movement, creating a polished animation and simulating its motion is a breeze. Here, we'll show you how to start animating mates for your own models in SolidWorks. The mate controller can be accessed within any SolidWorks assembly, and it's available in standard, professional and Premium versions. It can be used to drive positions for a series of supported mates, including angle, distance limit, angle limit, distance, path slot and width mates. All of these mate types have dimensions that can be specified, which is why the mate controller can adjust them before you start animating mates. It's a good idea to name any mates that you'd like to control, as this will help to make the selection process easier. To rename a mate. Right click on the item in the feature tree and select rename or slowly double click on the mate name to achieve this. It's important to note that mates stored in subassemblies can only be selected within the mate controller if the subassembly is made flexible. This can be done by left or right clicking on the subassembly name, and then clicking the Make Flexible icon. When you're in an assembly environment, the mate controller command can be found under the insert menu. Once active, we firstly prompted to collect the mates which will be controlling for smaller assemblies with a reduced number of supported mates. The Collect all supported mates button can be used, and this will search for any compatible mates and select them for us automatically. For larger assemblies there may be several supported mates which we don't need to control. In this case we'll need to select the required mates manually. Use the feature Tree flyout menu to select which mates you're looking for. And as mentioned previously, this is where naming your mates helps them to stand out and makes the selection process easier. Try to consider the order of the mates when making selections with the mate controller. We'll order this list to make sure that the first mates to be controlled appear at the top of the list. To rearrange any selections, we can left click on them from within the mate selection box and then use the move up or Move down buttons. Once we have the desired mate selected, we're ready to start adding mate positions. This section of the property manager has five key buttons to be aware of. The first is ad position and we'll be clicking this to save a position as a step and move on to the next. Secondly, there is update position which can be used to save and update a position where we've edited a value. Reset position will undo changes made to a position and delete position will delete the selected position. Reorder positions can be used if we decide to adjust the order of positions displayed during the finished animation. In most cases, the first position will remain without any adjustments. This ensures that we've got a good starting point to move on to position two. We click Add Position. Positions can be named to provide a more descriptive name for the step. For position two will be adjusting the claw gantry in the Z direction, and this can be achieved using the arrows or by inputting a new value. If limit, distance or angle mates have been used, then values exceeding the limits will not be permitted. Once a new mate position has been described, we click Add Position again to save the change. When the animation's calculated later, the positions in between will be automatically interpolated within position three. We'll leave the gantry depth mate untouched since it's now in the right position, and we can adjust the gantry width. Each new position will copy the settings of the previous step, so we can focus on new mate adjustments. Further positions will then be added to show the extension of the claw, for these will extend each of the four telescopic sections out a small amount per position. also begin to close the claw as it descends using some angle mates to ensure that both claw arms move together. We must make sure that the values for each arm are in the same position. Finally, here we'll add some steps to reset the claw to its starting position. Each position can be viewed individually by using the dropdown menu and if adjustments to values were required, we could use the Update Position button to save changes if needed. To further simulate the crane game, we could add mates to the prize to simulate its motion being lifted and dropped. All right, so now that we're happy with our mate controller, we can actually create an animation for it. The animation section contains a table with each position and the time. This time is the duration between each position and the next, which can be adjusted if needed. We click Calculate Animation to begin processing, and once complete, we can use the playback buttons to view the animation or directly export it using the Save Animation button. For more control over your mate controller animation, the mate controller can actually be imported into the animation toolbar, and this can be found under a new motion study by clicking on Animation Wizard and selecting Make Controller to import. If you're new to creating animations in SolidWorks, then check out our video and blog tutorials around our website and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn more about the products and services we offer. As part of the Troy Mate Group with an animation in SolidWorks, the animation timeline can also be imported into SolidWorks. Visualize to develop your textures and appearances at Studio lighting and control cameras with precision. If you're interested in learning more about the mate controller or any of the more advanced features of SolidWorks, then consider attending our Advanced Parts SolidWorks training course. Be sure to visit our website for more information and get in touch today via the details on screen.