hamei said:
Seriously, there are free apps that will create an animation also. Maybe
Blender ?
Well, I used the same free one that Gary used and got the same junky results. The
question is what 'free' one gives good enough quality output to capture a
fly-through that's the equivalent of using Pro/FLY-THROUGH.
on a Silicon Graphics box of course this is a picnic
It's an important point: SGI boxes are built for graphics handling; screen capture
like this is not the greatest challenge SGI boxes handle. And one of their
strengths is good, well buffered graphics cards.
So the software has to be up to the challenge, but so must the hardware. If your
gpu is closer to a $3000 one than a $300 one, you'll have a better chance of
success. Some might suggest getting a card, like on of the ATI All-in-Wonder cards
that seem to have specialized in screen capture, but we're still talking about
Pro/e here. In any case, it's hard to believe that a workstation at a national
lab, running Pro/e, would have inadequate hardware.
The main thing you get with Pro/e's built-in applications is roughly termed
integration. It has several applications capable of making animations: Mechanica
can capture and play back the stress of loading a part, shown in color; Mechanism
Design can capture a mechanism's movement through a programmed range of motion,
including highlighting interferernce between parts; Design Animation can capture
the animation of a mechanism, including assembly/disassembly while it is moving;
and finally, Fly-Through captures moving the viewpoint through the assembly, along
a predefined path. In all these applications, Pro/e takes certain known limits of
motion, say position A and position B and a definition of the motion in time or
length, figures out frames per second or you set a total time or total frames.
Then IT takes care of dividing up the movement from A to B, even creating the
trajectory, as in the case of DAX, puts a bunch of points along that trajectory,
one for each frame, then moves the assembly or component to that point, takes a
snapshot, moves it to the next point, snap and keeps doing that, at whatever pace
your system can handle, until it gets all the frames for the AVI or MPEG. I really
don't see, even with good screen capture software and a great system, how you
could duplicate this manually, much less smoothly and certainly not efficiently.
Even a relatively simple animation could take days or even weeks.
David Janes
Seriously, there are free apps that