Screenplay Animation

Screenplay is an integrated animation tool in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ that allows you to tell a story about figures of merit in your simulations. The underlying technology used in Screenplay is known as keyframe animation.

Keyframes define scene properties at chosen points in time. When you render the animation, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ interpolates smooth transitions between successive keyframes.

Screenplay supports keyframes for many properties of post-processing objects such as scenes, displayers, derived parts, cameras, and transforms. A visual editor helps you create animations using drag-and-drop techniques.

Authoring an animation is a demanding and potentially time-consuming task. In the same way as a director controls the making of a movie, you are required to plan a story board, extract solution content, and control the interaction of events. However, even a simple Screenplay setup such as a solution history sweep combined with camera panning can be of great value, and a step towards more complex visualizations involving multiple displayers.

To define an animation, you drag certain properties of displayers and attributes onto the Screenplay editor timeline. When a property lands on the timeline, Screenplay creates a keyframe sequence that provides two points in time for which the property value is defined. For some properties you can add extra keyframes within the sequence. This keyframe sequence sits inside an action block, which appears as an shaded rectangle on the Screenplay editor. In addition to dragging properties, you can also drag View and Scene animation nodes from a scene's attributes, and the Simple Transform node from Tools > Transforms.

When a Screenplay animation is open for editing, the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ interface looks as shown in the following image:

1. Screenplay node and child objects. These include actions which in turn include keyframe sequences.
2. Scene whose object properties you control using Screenplay animations
3. Screenplay Editor