Animation viewer
 

Hi all,

I am currently having problems finding a good viewer for some CFD work I am doing. My solution is a transient flow so I want to animate the data.

I am currently producing frames of the animation in AVS .x format, then converting the frames to GIFs then joining the frames together to make animated GIFs. The best utility I have at the moment for viewing the animated GIFs is Netscape - it plays the animation from beginning to end OK, but it does not allow you to look at the individual frames or to change the speed of the animation.

Does anyone know of a better animated GIF viewer which will allow me to view individual frames? Or maybe I should try a different format? I prefer to generate the individual frames as AVS .x files, but I can convert it from there into just about any other format. The "Framer" utility which comes with TecPlot is about what I want, but I don't know how to convert my files into the raster metafiles it requires.

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

Glenn

Re: Animation viewer
 

If you just want to view and edit you GIF file, you may download Paint Shop Pro from http://www.jasc.com/psp.html .

If you are interested in viewing and postprocessing your CFD results further, you may contact with Intelligent Light Co. Ltd., http://www.ilight.com/ . You can get the excellent software FILEDVIEW for a one-month free use. Please tell them you are introduced by me from VINAS Co. Ltd. Japan. They alse have academic license (very cheap !).

Zhong Lei

Re: Animation viewer
 

Hi Zhong,

Thanks for the info, but that's not really what I am looking for. I already have AVS as my post-processing software, and Imagemagick (http://www.wizards.dupont.com/cristy/ImageMagick.html) as my graphics file conversion software.

I should have mentioned that I am running on Win95/NT machines.

I am looking for a simple, small, fast and free (Yes, I know I am a scrooge) viewer for animated GIFs. Alternatively if a suitable viewer in another format is available I can switch formats.

Glenn

Re: Animation viewer
 

(1). Have you search the Internet ? (2). When I type " gif animator " in Yahoo, and netzero web search, it returned several gif animator software for PC.

Re: Animation viewer
 

Hi John,

I did search the net before I posted this, but I searched for "gif viewer" - and the results were all designed for generating GIFs, not displaying them. I tried "gif animator" as you suggested, and hidden amugst many more GIF generators was a MS utility which has got a decent GIF display. Victory at last! Just goes to show how frustrating searching the net can be....

For any other interested people out there, the page is:

http://www.servethe.net/free-zone/giffer.html

Thanks John, much appreciated.

Glenn

Re: Animation viewer
 

Hi,

As you had already AVS, the animation is so simple with "animate integer" module. All what you had to do is to save your AVS file as file-001.inp and so on. You may see the AVS doc. You can do all what you want with AVS.

Farid.

Re: Animation viewer
 

You just mentioned that you are using Imagemagick as your image conversion utility. With Imagemagick comes, at least for Unix, a tool called animate. This tool can be used to view MIFF-type animations which you can generate from a series of single images with Imagemagick convert.

Sebastian

MPEG Player
 

You can also try the Mpeg Player. The software exists for PCs, but also on other machines using Unix. It is quite simple to use. You create a 'movie' file using an MPEG command and then you view the 'movie' file using another MPEG command. When the mpeg movie file is created, it can be viewed as a movie (or as individual pictures) by accessing it also through Netscape. Your University has certainly this software on their machines. The only thing you will need (in addition to the source gif image files) is an example file to create the movie file. If you are interested I can give you more details, or maybe you can get more details from the computer people at your institution.

Cheers, Patrick