Animating Parameters
Catia/DP does not have any controls built in to let you animate a set of parameters in the same way you could do in Maya or XSI so we will have to do this in an alternative way; iterating through a design table that contains enough options to create a smooth animation and take a screen-shot for each option. To help you with this task we have put together a little automation script.
- Download the script file and folder and extract it to you root c:/. The newly extracted folder should contain one file, DesignTableScreenCap.catvbs, which is the macro script, and one folder frames where all the screen-caps will be placed.
- Open your DP project with the design table loaded.
- Rename the design table “AnimationTable”
- Running the script: Provided the folder was uncompressed to the right place and the design table has been renamed you are now ready to run the script and generate the screen-shots. Select the DesignTableScreenCap.catvbs hit Run. DP will begin to iterate through all the 1200 “frames” in the design table and write these to c:\macros\frames\
- Compressing the video: (This step is optional → we can do the compression of frames into video to help you save time) There are a lot of tools to assemble the frames into a video clip and if you are familiar with working with video pick whichever tool is easiest. However, a good and free one is VirtualDub. Additionally you will need a suitable video codec to to compress the video-stream.
To make things easier I will take care of the conversion from image sequence to video for you. Please load all images in C:\macros\frames on a flash-drive and give them to me no later than lunchtime tomorrow. I will either be in the lab or in my office: 275B. — Thomas Wingate 2008/12/04 13:26
Some tips
- You can hide both the tree and the Compass in the View menu in DP
- Setting the screen background to a single color in stead of a gradient makes the compression easier and the video file smaller
- Turn on anti-aliasing of lines in Tools → Options


