Inventor Dynamic Simulation is a great tool for assimilating motion, finding any unknown forces that might be present in your assembly and then using those forces in an FEA simulation to see if anything is going to break.
Take a crane for instance. You have many different joint that can move in both a radial and translatory manner.
After creating an assembly in Inventor it is not too difficult to prep the model for your Dynamic simulation. When moving from the assembly environment to the Dynamic Simulation environment, Inventor will analyse the motion that has been inferred onto your parts and automatically create joints.
In the browser you will notice that there are 3 sections Grounded, Mobile groups and Standard Joints.
The standard joints section is the automated joints that have been created by analysing the motion that has been inferred by the joints that have been created. Some of these joints might ot be what you are looking for.
You can delete the joints that do not work for you as well a add manual joints.
If you need to limit the motion of the joints, you can go to the properties of the joints. Depending on the degrees of freedom, will determine how many tabs will be shown.
In a cylindrical joint you have 2 tabs, one for translation and 1 for rotation around the axis of the translation.
In the above image you will see dof 2(T) for translation and dof 1(R) for the rotation portion By selecting a min and max value you can restrict the movement between 2 positions when the assembly is being simulated.
The same would apply for rotation as pictured above.
