Animation capabilities are available among the options under Utility Menu> PlotCtrls and via the animation macros. If you are animating a deformed shape or different mode shapes of your analysis, the program stores the animation frames in a file called Jobname.AVI (where Jobname is the jobname for the current session). After completing this step, the program opens the Windows Media Player.

To animate contours, the program displays a dialog box from which you can select animation options. The program generates the frames and Windows Media Player displays them.

The Replay animation option starts Windows Media Player. If you have stored an animation sequence during the current session, the file name associated with it is passed to Windows Media Player automatically.

You can animate other quantities or generate an animation in other parts of the program via the /SEG command.

AVI files cannot be created directly in batch mode.

While running Windows Media Player, you can use OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to export your animation to other applications. Select the Copy option under the Edit menu. Then, you can embed the animation object in another OLE-compliant application. For example, you can embed animation objects in Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint.

After an animation object is embedded in an application, you can double-click on the object to start playing back your animation. To share your compound document with others, give them the Jobname.AVI file that you created and a copy of the file containing the embedded animation sequence.