record a fly-thru

AFAIK, some limited features of Pro/FLY-THROUGH have been incorporated into WF Foundation Advantage. But the separate add-on is still available and needed to do the screen capture. Some packages, like Advanced Design, incorporate it. Otherwise, it's a separate purchase.

If it's just a one-time deal and you don't mind the hassle, you don't need any extra software. Windows, right ? Just use the "Print Scrn" key. That'll copy a screenshot to the clipboard. Then open the bitmap editor from Accessories (forget the name) and do a 'paste.' It'll ask you a question about scaling then drop the bitmap right into the utility. Save, then you can edit that in a grafix program such as irfanview. (Irfanview is free and nice for lightweight grafix manipulation, btw. Irfanview might even collate the indi- vidual images into an mpeg, I forget. If not, use Shake or Maya or borrow a Mac :) Seriously, there are free apps that will create an animation also. Maybe Blender ?

on a Silicon Graphics box of course this is a picnic, but Windows is so much better p)

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.

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

sure, but I thought he just wanted to do a one-time thingy, not become the next Steven Spielberg :)

(btw, the sgi boxes do do exactly those kinds of things, which is one of the fun things about running them. A base Irix install includes all kinds of video tools. This kind of simple project would be fun on an octane. It's also interesting to compare video-editing software prices to CADCAM - ya know how people bitch that pro/E costs fifteen grand ? check out the top-end Discreet programs. $250,000 or so ...)