Water Flow Tutorial Rendering a Movie of the Fluid Data

To finish this in-depth tutorial we will create a a simple movie from the water flow simulation data. The movie will display the movement of the water sub-volume and leverage a few more bells and whistles to create a polished visualization.

• Start with the basic tank boundary and water isovolume plot setup (you can restore your dbreak3d_plot_basic.session file or use the dbreak3d_plot_basic.py python script)
• Open the Pseudocolor plot attributes
• Under Color, for Opacity select Constant
• For Opacity select Constant
• Set the Opacity slider value to 65%
• Click Apply and Dismiss

Setting the Window Annotations

To make the visualization look more polished, we will change the window annotations and background, lighting, and add a time slider annotation:

• Open the Annotations Window (Controls->Annotation)
• On the 1st Yab:
  • Click No Annotations
  • Click Apply
• On the 3D Tab:
  • Recheck Show bounding box
• On the Color Tab:
  • Set the Foreground color to be the same color as our tank boundaries plot.
  • Select a Gradient background with the Radial style.
  • Set Gradient color 1 to be light gray
  • Set Gradient color 2 to be very dark gray

• On the Objects Tab:
  • Create a new Time slider annotation.
  • For the name dialog type ts and click Ok
    • Set the Width to 40%
    • Set the Height to 7%
    • Set the Start color to Light Blue
    • Set the End color to a darker Blue
    • Set the Text color to White
    • Uncheck Rounded and Shaded

The default light shines straight on to the scene, which is not as intuitive for humans who are primarily used to overhead lighting.

• Open the Lighting Window (Controls->Lighting)
  • Move the light vector up and to the right.
  • Click Apply

Try a few different settings until you find a setting you are satisfied with.

• Click Dismiss

Encoding the movie

Now we are ready to create an mpeg of the visualization.

• Open the Save Movie wizard (File->Save movie)
• Follow the prompts to create a MPEG movie with a 1000x1000 output resolution.

This will render all of the timesteps of the simulation data and create an mpeg in your home directory. You can also save a sequence of images in addition to encoding to a movie format.

The end!