Mike,
Pro/ENGINEER Design Animation is included in Foundation and allows animation of Key Frame Sequences of parts in an assembly (Application - Animation). The first step is to group your assembly into Bodies (groups of components that you'd expect to move as one). Then you create a Key Frame Sequence which is a series of snapshots that has these bodies dragged to different locations. You can distribute these snapshots along a time line and the software will smoothly animate between them. Additional capabilities are View@time, Display@time (hidden, wireframe etc) and Transparency@time. There are plenty of more capabilities but let's start with those for now.
In your case it seems you'd like to simulate Deformation, which is a little tricky but can be visually achieved by creating a demo assembly with multiple component stacked that are incrementally "deformed" in any way you choose to. Using a Family Table to create many parts that are incrementally changed is a way to speed this up. Then, in Pro/ENGINEER Design Animation, you can use Display@time to blank/unblank them sequentially.
Optionally you can use Pro/ENGINEER Mechanism (also in Foundation) to build a chopped up assembly with Mechanism Joints that rotate or move to mimic deformation.
Ihad some issues attaching demo files to this post, will try again later and see if it's a system thing.
Good luck and have fun!
/Petter
