How to Save an Animation in Abaqus

The TECHNIA Simulation technical team were asked for advice in how to create videos for PowerPoint presentations with Abaqus/CAE. As this information can prove useful for more users, we’ve decided to publish it as a quick blog post.

Steps to Save an Animation in Abaqus

It is always helpful to consider what information you want to present and then find a visually intuitive way to convey this information with regards to geometry and loading:

1. Select a viewport size and an appropriate aspect ratio for the assembly. 
2. Prepare the content; instances, contour plots, legend limits, deformation scale factor.
3. Annotations to help describe the animation

Follow these two steps to save the animation as a video file:

1. Select animation type in the visualization toolbox. Time-history is most used. 
2. File > Animate > Save As… Select Format: AVI and Codec: “Microsoft Video 1”.
3. This will create an animation that can be imported and played in a PowerPoint presentation.
   If you only wish to review the animation Windows Media Player: The codec (RLE 8bit/pixel) offers better compression. Please note that the default “Film & TV” does not support these formats, select Windows Media Player to view the animations on a windows system.

Animation Tips in Abaqus

Here are some tips on how to make your animations really shine.

Viewport Annotations
Reduce clutter and redundant information by Viewport > Viewport Annotation Options.

Overlay Plots
Great Feature to focus attention on specific components whilst providing context of model.

Follower Node
Set View Camera to 'Move with A Node'.
This allows you to give the perspective of a specific part of the assembly.

High-Quality Export

In order to achieve the best quality and compression we can export the animation as uncompressed video and re-compress it using third-party solutions. Please be advised, uncompressed files easily become very large!

Personally, I prefer to use the opensource tool ffmpeg to convert these videos into videos:

• ffmpeg -I Uncompressed.avi -b:v 16000k powerpointFriendly.wmv
• ffmpeg-i Uncompressed.avi compressed.mp4

Conversion to .mp4 uses h.264 as default and gives great compression rates.