ParaView/Users Guide/Animation

In ParaView, you can create animations by recording a series of keyframes. At each keyframe you set values for the properties of the readers, sources and filters that make up the visualization pipeline, as well as the position and orientation of the camera. Once you have chosen the parameters of the animation, you can play through the animation. When you play the animation, you can cache the geometric output of the visualization pipeline in memory. When you subsequently replay the animation, playback will be much faster, because very little computation must be done to generate the images. Also the results of the animation can be saved to image files (one image per animation frame) or to a movie file. The geometry rendered at each frame can also be saved in ParaView’s PVD file format, which can be loaded back into ParaView as a time varying data set.

Animation View

Animation View is the user-interface used to create animations by adding keyframes. It is modeled similar to popular animation and key-frame editing application with ability to create tracks for animating multiple parameters. The Animation View is accessible from the View menu.

This view is presented as a table. Above the table are the controls that control how time progresses in the animation. These were discussed previously. Within the table the tracks of the animation appear are rows, and animation time is presented increasing from left to right. The first row in the table, simply labeled Time, shows the total span of time that the animation can cover. The currently displayed time is indicated both in the Time field at the top and with a thick, vertical, draggable line within the table.

Along the left side of the Animation View is an expandable list of the names of the animation tracks (i.e., a particular object and property to animate). You choose a data source and then a particular property of the data source in the bottom row. To create a animation track with keyframes for that property, click the plus mark on the left-hand side. This will create a new track. In the figure, tracks already exist for SphereSource1’s Phi Resolution property and for the Camera’s position. To delete a track press the 'X' button. You can temporarily disable a track by un-checking the checkbox on the right of the track. To enter values for the property, double-click within the white area to the right of the track name. This will bring up the Animation Keyframes dialog. Double-clicking in the camera entry brings up a dialog like the one in the following figure.

From the Animation Keyframes dialog you can press New to create new keyframes or press Delete or Delete All to delete some or all of them. Clicking New will add a new row to the table. In any row, you can click within the Time column to choose a particular time for the keyframe and click in the right-hand column to enter values for the parameter. The exact user interface components that let you set values for the property at the keyframe time vary. When available, you can change the interpolation between two keyframes by double-clicking on the central interpolation column.

Within the tracks of the Animation View, the place in time where each keyframe occurs is shown as a vertical line. The values chosen for the property at that time and the interpolation function used between that value and the next are shown as text when appropriate. In previous figure for example, the sphere resolution begins at 10 and then changes to 20 varying by linear interpolation between them. The camera values are too lengthy to show as text so they are not displayed in the track, but we can easily see that there are four keyframes spaced throughout the animation. The vertical lines in the tracks themselves are draggable, so you can easily adjust the time at which each keyframe occurs.