V5 Kinematics for Everyone
by Brian C. Barsamian
MSC Software
714-445-3058

V5 Kinematics is an extremely user-friendly product and can be used by any CATIA novice; all that is required is a very basic understanding of V5 assemblies. It is one of the most fun, coolest and easy to use products from Dassault. Besides all that, it's also incredibly useful. This article will cover the basics of kinematics in a very simple and easy to understand manner. Kinematics allows you to make your assemblies move. Of course we engineers like to use fancier names, like "mechanism simulation" or "product animation", but kinematics is really just making parts move, or is it? And what exactly does "move" mean? Actually we do need to watch our terminology (my fancy name for words) a little because there are actually several closely related topics that are often confused with kinematics.