ParaFoam animation
 

Can someone give the quick steps to create an animation with paraFoam. I have velocity data at different timesteps. How should I proceed? Is there a simple tutorial available? The one on the paraView webpage is confusing.

If you've successfully read in
 

If you've successfully read in your openfoam case, you should see all different timesteps. Just change your layout and push the accept button. Do not (!) select any of the timesteps. Now you should be able to push the play button in the animation panel. One of the record buttons let you save pictures or an avi.

Actually it's very easy:-)

Frank

Very quick pointer: - Set u
 

Very quick pointer:

- Set up the visualization you want
- Make sure you selected the timestep of the source with the slider bar (not the radio-buttons!) This is the most common pitfall because the time-step won't change during the animation otherwise
- Change to the animation view
- Unselect the "Cache mesh"-option (used to be a memory leak)
- Try the "Play" button
- If that works: "Save animation"

(all GUI-element-names are only approximations from memory)

Thank you Frank and Bernhard.
 

Thank you Frank and Bernhard. I was able to view the animation from within paraFoam. However, when I try to save it, I get the GLXBadContext error as reported by a few others in the forum. I am looking into this new problem now. Thanks once again for your help!

Hi,

I just cannot seem to export an animation as an avi, my problem is this:

I set up the animation I want to export (typically some stress field varying with time).
I can view this animation just fine.

When I go File->save animation, it will save create an avi file but this file will just be a picture of my geometry that doesn't change with time. The avi will play for how many seconds I set it too but the picture doesn't change.

I am using paraview-3.4.0 and 3.6.0 (binaries downloaded from paraview). I use foamToVTK to visualise my cases. I have even tried paraview on my mac.

I have searched the web but I haven't found anything that explains it clearly.

I am able to export the animation as a set of images.


I must be missing something very simple as I have tried a few different paraview installation to no avail,
I would really appreciate it if someone could give me some suggestions.

Philip C

figured out a work-around
 

Hi again,


I figured out a work-around.

I can 'save animation' in paraview to one of the image formats (jpeg,tiff or png), and then I use the command:

convert -delay 30 *.jpg video.mpg

...or whatever the image type you are using. Adding in '-delay 30' gets the video to play a reasonable speed, it's too fast otherwise.

convert uses mpeg2encode so you have to install this package.


Philip