Animation export to other file

[GRS]

Can an animation in WF5 be exported to another format, such as PDF or ???

Thanks for your help and attention!

Jerry

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[BrianMartin]

Hi Gerald...

Well, you can export animations as an MPEG file. That should get you most of what you want. If you want to export Pro/E into PDF... you can create a 3D PDF by exporting into the .U3D format (File->Save a copy).

Are you talking about exporting an animation creating in Pro/ANIMATE... or are you talking about something else?

Bottom line... there are many options to capture an animation depending upon what you're trying to do, how you've created the animation, your desired output quality, and the licenses of Pro/E you own. We don't have enough information to go on yet. If you can help fill in the blanks, I'm sure we can help you.

Thanks!

-Brian

[GRS]

Brian,

Thanks for the info, we do not have Pro/animate or Creo View. I will look into the 3D PDF.

Thanks anyway. Jerry

[BrianMartin]

Ouch... you don't have EITHER piece of software you need.

In order... I'd go with:

(1) Creo View - which you said is not an option

(2) Creo Animate (Pro/ANIMATE) - also not an option

(3) POVRay... if that's even still out there. years ago this was a freeware tool people used to make decent animations from Pro/E models. It was tough but eventually someone made a GUI for it. I haven't seen it around in years but I believe it's still out there.

(4) Depending upon what you're trying to do, sometimes you can just capture the Pro/E graphics screen and have Pro/E do some of the work for you. For example, exploded assemblies can be made to animate on screen. If you tell Pro/E to make a very smooth animation, you can capture it and turn that into your video easily- for free. Try the free trial of Camtasia Studio... or the free Techsmith product called Jing (www.techsmith.com)

(5) Screen grabs stitched together to form an animation. I literally did one of these and they wanted to air it on the Discovery Channel. I was horrified because it was just a series of 1200 individual frames stitched together. You can use Quicktime Professional ($30) to do the stitching and publishing... it works well but you'll hate making the individual frames. FYI normal video runs at 30 frames per second so you'll need 900 frames for a 30 second animation. Also FYI, film runs at 24 frames per second. I used to own a video production company.

(6) Lightwave 3D or 3D Studio with Okino Polytrans software - fantastic output... a little pricey for the translator (that's the 'Polytrans' thing)

Good luck Gerald! Let us know how you end up tacking the problem.

Thanks!

-Brian