Hello!
I am currently working with Simumatik with the goal of simulating an animatronic head I am working with for a research project. Our goal is to use the simulation to test a raspberry pi code we are using on the actual prototype with the digital twin in hopes the people coding our pi will be able to refine it for the actual model via the twin. The animatronic moves off a series of servo motors and linkages to make items such as the eyeballs, eyelids, jaw, etc. move to create human like expressions. I have attempted to research topics similar to this in an attempt to find solutions but have struggled thus far. My questions are if and how should I make the individual motors made from custom models in the unit move? or should I simplify and move to using just movement off the body components?
Making things move using different kinds of joints/constraints is explained in several courses of the academy. I recommend you to check how 6-axis robots, pneumatic cylinders and these kinds of elements are built in Simumatik. You will get good ideas.
Another thing you need to consider is how to build your animatronic. Will it be just a component or a group of them? How many movements does it have?
Finally, getting the setpoints for all these movements, controlled in position or velocity, is not that complicated. You could use MQTT or just the generic UDP Driver to send variables to a component from the Raspi. We have examples in the Gateway course in Python.
Please, tell us more about your project so we can help you more. Pictures or links may help.