[Paraview] Animation from a sequence of images

[Brad King]

don fisher wrote:
> I have created a display of my radially symmetric data set using the 
> legacy VTK file format. I would like to generate an animation from 
> sequential frames of this data. My first approach was to include all of 
> the data frames as fields in the VTK data file. The users guide 
> describes fields as "essentially and array of data arrays".
> 
> I have purchased most of the books, and see no method for arranging the 
> sequential display of these fields. I assume something as simple as this 
> must be possible.

Take a look at section 3.1 of the book "ParaView Guide", on page 25 
under the "Time Support" section.  Basically you can just write each 
frame to a separate file and name them sequentially:

frame001.vtk
frame002.vtk
frame003.vtk
...

and then load the first file with a reader.  The GUI will contain a 
Timestep slider to choose the frame.  Then go to the animation interface 
and choose the Timestep parameter to animate.  Right now this will only 
work up to 100 frames but you can edit the ParaView source to extend 
this limit if you need to (and we plan to fix this limitation in the 
future).

For more than 100 frames you can use the .pvd format to reference as 
many frames as you want.  Just create a sphere source and animate it 
with the "Save Geometry" feature.  Inspect the resulting .pvd file to 
see its format.

-Brad