I have read the previous messages on creating animation but it does not seems to help. Here is my problem. I am currenly running a time-dependent problem as such i have autosave lots of data file at interval of 1second. Altogether there are 30 secs of data file. How can i form an animation of the 30 differnet data file of my grid. I am trying to animate the contours display of my grid.

Hi,

As i said previously, there is many solutions to make animations files under fluent: batch files, long journal files or with scheme.

I succeed in writing a scheme program (with some parts of code given on this forum) to automate the making of animation. The procedure i will try to explain you (excuse my poor english but i'm a french student) is a little bit complicate but it works well.

The first thing you need to know is whether you want the same scale on each picture, or if you don't care the colors don't represent the same value in different frames. The latest is more simple than the first solution, that's why i'll explain the first one.

the first thing you have to do is to download the file pp.tar.gz on ftp.cfd-online.com/fluent (don't search it now i haven't send it again). On this file, you will find four files files: minimaxi.c, pp-init.jou, minimax.scm and pp-only.scm.

The file minimaxi.c is a UDF file, you have to compile it as you'll have to run it as compiled UDF and not as interpreted UDF. You need to use cc (gcc under linux), if you don't know how to do read the fluent documentation, the differents steps are well described.

The file pp-init.jou is a fluent journal file. Its goal is to prepare the postprocessing: location of the camera, image file format, image size...

The file minimax.scm is a scheme (LISP) file. Its goal is to go and search in all data files the values mini and maxi of pressure, vx, vy and v magnitude. So with theses values you can use the best scale for your animations.

The file pp-only.scm is again a scheme file. Its goal is to export data files under image file representing pressure, vx, vy, v and velocity vector. Then you can easily animate theses images with the software imagemagick given with fluent (search in the directory contrib).

In abstract:

compile minimax.c

load minimax.scm (file/load scheme file...) type under fluent: (minimax [args...])

load pp-only.scm type under fluent: (pp-only [args...])

It is a litlle bit hard, but when it works it is very quick and easy to postprocess data files.

To finish, don't forget that i described only the global mechanism, and you'll need to read and personalize my differents sources files, it will never work if you don't do that.

Good luck.

Mickael

You can also create animations using Graphics Workshop (to convert images to tif format) and then importing the gif images into GIF Construction Set. Both of these software packages are easy to use and you can download a shareware version for testing from Alchemy Mindworks, Inc. at www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html

Animation Shop from Paint Shop PRo also does a very good job of creating animations in general. You just have to dump tiff files from fluent and then read in the tiff files into animation shop. It does let you do a whole bunch of editing later on.

If you just want some contour animation, go to Solve-->Monitors-->Command. There, you can issue commands to let Fluent write out a .tiff at each time step. After your simulation, you have a collection of tiff files. Then, UNIX%animate *.tiff command will show you the animation.

An excellent and comprehensive Fluent postprocessing FAQ is at

http://www.bakker.org/cfm/graphics02.htm