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How to Save and Export Animations in Abaqus for Powerpoint

Table of contents

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”.video-abaqus-2
  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.video-abaqus-3

Overlay Plots
Great Feature to focus attention on specific components whilst providing context of model.video-abaqus-4

Follower Node
Set View Camera to 'Move with A Node'video-abaqus-4a.
This allows you to give the perspective of a specific part of the assembly.Follower

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!video-abaqus-6

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.

video-abaqus-7

 

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