Animation
 

I am having difficulty making movies of unsteady flows. My current problem involves two zones. I am able to use Tecplot to animate the zones, however it only animates one zone at a time. Has anyone used software that will enable one to animate X number of zones together?

Re: Animation
 

Yes, you can animate more than one/two zones in tecplot using the tecplot-macros. This is however limited to something about 50 (could be 60, I can't remember the exact number) zones, so it will not do for long-time animations.

The solution we found is as follows:

1) Use a shell-script to do a loop for the number of timelevels you want to process. You will have to provide a single datafile for each timelevel. 2) Within the loop call tecplot with the single current datafile (i.e. in batch-mode). You could use some generic datafile-name if the shell-script will take care of the correct file. 3) Let tecplot produce a single graphic output-file, i.e. postscript or tiff. Again, you can use some generic name if the shell-script takes care of some intelligent naming, i.e. numbering of the data-files. 4) Put all data-files in a single directory. 5) Use some tools like ImageMagick (http://www.wizards.dupont.com/cristy/) to combine all files to a single mpeg-file. As an example, suppose all files are postscript-files. You can produce a mpeg-movie using the commnd "convert *.ps movie.mpeg".

Hope this helps, Chris

By the way, there is a mailing-list for tecplot-users. Consider tecplot-talk@mail.amtec.com

Re: Animation
 

Where are your data from ?

You can try EnSight. It is a good animation software and they also offer a 1 month trial license.