Overview

The Animation module to create interactive and flexible animations of a variety of different Vulcan data. For example, each stage in the development of an underground mine could be included in an animation to show the progressive appearance of the workings for each stage in the development. Another example, if the distribution of contaminates in a landfill over a number of years is included in an animation, then the development of polluted hot spots can be found and analysed easily by flipping through the recorded times.

The animation module is a key frame animation module. A key frame style means that you specify a list of frames that can be displayed and the actors for those frames. Each frame is then displayed, one after the other, to give the appearance of animation.

An actor is one piece of Vulcan data that can appear in one or more frames. There are three types of actors available: triangulations, layers and grids.

While there are different methods for displaying the above actors, there are two basic display types. One sees each actor as a single object that is inserted into specified frames (for example, a topography is placed into the first three and the last two frames). The other sees each actor as a sequence of data where each item in the sequence is inserted into its own frame (for example, the results of a ground water study where the water table for 10 different times, produces 10 different surfaces with each surface being inserted into its own frame).

A sequence actor is generally defined by a prefix. Any data that begins with that prefix will be included in the actor and separated into its own frame. For example, a layer sequence with a prefix of poly_ will match the layers poly_1232, poly_1526, poly_1121 and poly_8834. The suffix is used as the frame name for the data, for example, 1232, 1526, 1121 and 8834.

A frameis a collection of actors that are displayed together. The list of possible frames for an animation can be optionally specified in a frame table, or through the collection of all the allowable frames (as specified by the actors). Taking all the frames specified by the actors, sorting them and then using those frames and order as the structure for the animation creates a collection of frames. This allows you to ignore the step of organising the animation's order when the order is generally implied (for example, when you use a sequence actor, the frames are the identifiers of each datum in the sequence and the order is the order of the data in the sequence).

Note:   A single frame can contain up to 5000 actors.

When a frame table is used, a list of allowable frame names, associated descriptions and their order in the animation, must be specified. Only actors that have frames in the frame table will be used. Basically, a frame table acts as a filter as to what frames can be displayed.

With a key frame style of animation, all data must be loaded, for all the frames, when the animation is run. Objects are not loaded and unloaded as they are used, but instead, everything is loaded initially and then their visibilities are toggled on/off to make them appear/disappear. The advantage of this is that the animation module can be used as an enhanced visibility option for Vulcan.

Each frame can represent a different group of objects where each frame contains the polygons for that frame's geology, for example, you could have four frames representing different geological codes: TQ1, TQ2, TQ3, TQ4. Flipping between the data for each geological code is as simple as flipping to another frame. Another advantage of loading all the data is, that the data is always active, that is, you can pick it, manipulate it and process it.

Note:   The animation module is not able to transform or change Vulcan data. It only toggles the visibility of existing data to give the illusion of animation. Therefore, any animation that requires data to move or change across time cannot be accomplished using the module. For example, the dynamic slicing of block modelling, using a Pexel file of the block model and the translation of a flat triangulation, cannot be performed unless you have many copied of the triangulation. Without many copies, there are not alternative triangulations to flip between -- hence, no animation.