10. Animation

This chapter discusses how to use VisIt to create animations. There are three ways of creating animations using VisIt: flipbooks, keyframing, and scripting. For complex animations with perhaps hundreds or thousands of database time steps, it is often best to use scripting. VisIt provides Python and Java language interfaces that allow you to program animation and save image files that get converted into a movie. The flipbook approach is strictly for static animations in which only the database time step changes. This method allows database behavior over time to be quickly inspected without the added complexity of scripting or keyframing. Keyframed animation can exhibit complex behavior of the view, plot attributes, and database time states over time. This chapter emphasizes the flipbook and keyframe approaches and explains how to create animations both ways.

• 10.1. Animation basics
  • 10.1.1. The .visit file
  • 10.1.2. Flipbook animation
  • 10.1.3. Animation Window
• 10.2. Keyframing
  • 10.2.1. Keyframing Window
• 10.3. Scripting
  • 10.3.1. Command Window
• 10.4. Movie tools