Keyframe Animation

With a flipbook animation, for example, you can easily sweep a surface or animate a rake, but nothing else. With a keyframe animation, while you are sweeping the surface you can be clipping the sides, turning on the visibility of a parallel surface showing a different scalar, and then sweeping them simultaneously, then change them to geometric colored then fade them out while rotating the view. However, you can also create a simple sweep or spin keyframe animation with just a few steps. Because of this potential to be complex, it is recommended that you plan out your keyframe animations, including what you want to accomplish, before you start creating them.

A keyframe animation consists of tracks of keyframes and actions. Tracks exist for each dataset, region, surface, and so on. Keyframes are user-created and attached to a given object's track. They summarize what happens and when to datasets, regions, surfaces and rakes. Actions are used to specify the "what" and the keyframe location on the track is used to specify the "when". Other things also have tracks associated with them. For instance, to rotate all of the datasets on the screen at the same time, a track can be created for the "World" level within the AcuFieldView hierarchy. Tracks can also be made for streamline and particle path display and lights.

The Keyframe Animation panel provides access to virtually all properties of AcuFieldView that are normally available through the interface. Therefore, with this one panel you will be accessing all of the normal surface and rake properties such as DISPLAY TYPE, SURFACE TYPE, Visibility and Thresholding that you are familiar with.