Fly-through animations are a creative way to visualize inside 3-dimensional plots.
In our latest Tips & Tricks video, I demonstrate how to develop these fly-through animations. The trick is, once you have your results stored in your data set, you need to define a results parameter that will be used to govern a filter of your plot group, and then the animation feature to develop the visualization.
Click below to watch as I walk you through the process. To help you follow along, we have included the video transcription below.
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“How to Develop Fly-Through Animations” Transcription
In this tips and tricks video I’m going to show you how to develop fly-through animations like this. The trick is once you have your results stored in your data set, to define a results parameter that will be used to govern a filter of your plot group, and then the animation feature to develop the visualization.
So, the first step is to define the results parameter. These results parameters are useful for parameters that you want to use during the results or post-processing. Typically, we are defining our parameters under global definitions and using those to apply boundary conditions, and auxiliary sweeps, material properties, other loading conditions. But, these results parameters as you see here, can be used after that modeling workflow has already taken place. You’ve already solved, but then you wanted to define a parameter that will be used to sweep for the development of these custom animations, like I just showed.
And the steps will be shown now. So we’ll right click on “Results”, select “Parameters” and then give the parameter name. So this will be a filter value that will be used to sweep the Y-values of this plot from the right-hand wall all the way to the left. So, I’ll add a filter feature to the volume plot for acoustic pressure and then use a Boolean expression here. So we’re only gonna plot the Y-values that are greater than the Y-sweep results parameter. Right now I have the Y-sweep results parameter set to zero, so the full volume plot is plotted. But if I set this equal to two meters which is halfway through the room (this is four meters in depth here), so two gives us halfway through. Then I could replot the acoustic pressure and see that it looks like this; and if I did a value of three, it would look like this. So, the idea here is that we could somehow sweep this quantity Y-sweep from zero to four, we could develop this animation and that’s exactly what we can do with the export feature. We’ll add an animation player and then instead of sweeping on the stored solutions, as we typically do after the transient analysis or a parametric sweep on loading parameter, we can also animate using these other options here. In our case, we’re going to animate based on the result parameter so we’ll switch the default value from “None” to “Y_sweep”. That’s the name of the parameter that we just defined. And then we’ll start at zero; we’ll stop at four. Set the units to meters and then we’ll click play and it will generate this animation with 25 frames, we can set it to play through once. Once this renders, then we’ll be able to repeat it pretty quickly. OK, that looks great we could play it again now.
So that was a tip on developing these fly-through animations. These were particularly helpful for visualizing inside 3-dimensional plots, in a creative way. So hopefully it’s been helpful to you. Thank you very much.