Installation and License

AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® is installed on your hard disk from the regular AnyBody™ installer.

In order to make sure that the add-in is installed, you must choose to either do a complete AnyBody™ installation, or you must specifically select to install the AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® add-in from the Tools section when doing a custom installation.

AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® requires a separate license, which is typically located in the same file as your AnyBody™ license.

Importing the license file into AnyBody™ through the license manager will place the file in the proper position for AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® to find it.

Getting Started

Loading the plug-in

AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® is delivered in the form of a DLL (Dynamic Link Library), which can be loaded as an add-in from SolidWorks by doing the following steps.

1. Start SolidWorks with administrator privileges (by using the "run as administrator" option in Windows).
2. Choose the menu ‘File’->’Open’.
3. In the file dialog, select ‘Add-Ins (*.dll)’ file extension type and choose the AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® DLL file.

The AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® DLL can be found in the AnyBody™ installation, typically in the folder ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\AnyBody Technology\AnyBody.X.X\Tools\AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS®’, where X.X indicates the AnyBody™ version number.

After you have loaded the AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® module successfully, you can see that AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® module appears in SolidWorks’ menu bar.

You are now ready to use SolidWorks as a powerful model authoring tool for the AnyBody Modeling System. It is only necessary to use "run as administrator" when loading the add-in, afterwards SolidWorks can be started normally.

Translating a CAD model

We imagine that an assembly of an exercise machine has been created in SolidWorks as shown in the figure below. An assembly in SolidWorks is a set of parts connected by mates, which are really kinematic constraints that, for instance, keep a shaft in a bearing or make two faces parallel. This forms a mechanism. The translation process generates an AnyBody™ segment from each of the parts and connects the segments with joints corresponding to the mates. To carry out the translation, please perform the following steps.

1. In the AnyBody Exporter for SOLIDWORKS® pull-down menu, choose the ‘Export to AnyScript’ operation.

2. A dialog with export options appears.

3. Next, type the name of the AnyScript™ (.any) file to be created. Then click the ‘Save’ button.

The model is now saved as AnyScript™ files and other related files, which are ready for usage in the AnyBody Modeling System. The selected file name is root file needed for inclusion into AnyBody™ models.

All other related files have that same first name but with an extension before the actual file extension. All files are in the same folder as the root folder.