3.4 Viewing and Controlling Animations

After you’ve simulated your model, you can animate the results. Animations replay the frames that ADAMS/Solver calculated during a simulation. Animations help you review and study the part movements within your model.

3.4.1 About Animating Your Simulation Results

Animations provide instant feedback to you as your simulation runs. When you perform a simulation, ADAMS/Solver, the analysis engine, creates one animation frame for every output step that you request in the simulation. For example, if you performed a simulation from 0.0 to 10.0 seconds and asked for output every 0.1 seconds, ADAMS/Solver records data at 101 steps or frames. It creates a frame every tenth of a second for ten seconds plus one at time 0.0.

By default, each time you run a simulation, ADAMS/Solver replaces the previous animation frames. To replay earlier animations, you must save them in your modeling database.

During animations, ADAMS/View displays frames as quickly as it can based on the graphics capability of your computer hardware.

3.4.2 Accessing the Animation Controls

You can work with animations using the Animation container on the Main toolbox or using the tools on the Animation Control dialog box. The dialog box contains the complete set of animation controls, while the Animation container contains only the most commonly used animation controls. The Animation container on the Main toolbox and the Animation Controls dialog box are shown in figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2 Animation Container and Animation Control Dialog Box

To display the Animation container on the Main toolbox:

• On the Main toolbox, select on the Animation tool .

To display the Animation Control dialog box, do one of the following:

• On the Animation container on the Main toolbox, select More.

• From the Review menu, select Animation Controls.

3.4.3 Playing Animations

You can replay an animation again after the simulation ends to investigate the results of a simulation, as long as the results of the simulation have been stored in your modeling database. By default, ADAMS/View only stores the last simulation you performed. You can either manually store a particular simulation, or you can set ADAMS/View so that it automatically stores all your simulations.

You can play animation frames forwards or backwards, speed them up or slow them down, pause and continue an animation, rewind to an earlier frame, continuously play an animation in a loop, or play only a certain portion of the entire sequence of frames.

Playing an Animation

When you play an animation, ADAMS/View plays every frame by default. You can rewind an animation and play the animation at various speeds as explained in table 3.1. During fast-forward and fast-backward play modes, ADAMS/View plays only every fifth frame.

Table 3.1 Animation Play Options

To play an animation:	Select the tool:
Forwards	Play-forward tool
Backward	Play-backward tool
Fast-forward mode	Play-fast-forward tool
Fast-backward mode	Play-fast-backward tool

Stopping an Animation

You can pause an animation at any time instead of waiting for it to complete.

To stop an animation, do one of the following:

• On the Main toolbox or the Animation Control dialog box, select the Pause tool .

• On the status bar, select the Stop tool .

• Press the Esc key.