Animate your simulations

Summary

• Preliminary
• Procedural animation
• Technical aspects
• General diagram of use
• One simple example
• Illustration videos
• Export 3D on a WEB page
• Demonstration WEB site

Preliminary

Warning : This site is a preview presentation of SimFonIA Ltd. visualization tools which will be put on the market in January 2012. The final and official website will be also online in January 2012.

The technical communication is usually difficult, especially for multi-disciplinary applications. SimFonIA offers an innovative solution to this problem by making the procedural animation accessible to a mass public.

Procedural animation

A procedural animation is a visual and animated reproduction which is automatically generated from existing data. The 3D visualization of simulated phenomena is much more explicit than curves or raw data. Thanks to the « SimFonIA Animation Tools » (SAT), scientific data become integrated in living animations.

SAT is intended for engineers, designers, teachers, students, inventors, lecturers and researchers who want to support their communication with convincing and dynamic visual elements.

Technical aspects

The simulation data from any tools, saved as a file, can drive a 3D animation. The SAT application consists of a SketchUp plugin (SAG), a visualization tool (SAV) and a JavaScript library (SAW).

The scene is drawn with the free Google SketchUp software, then users can make associations between the simulated values and the graphic attributs (position, size, orientation, color etc.). One single click allows to launch the animation and then to save it as video but also as a file which will be distributable and re-playable without any constraint (in that case manipulation and animation remain in 3D). The animation could also be visualized and manipulated by the intermediary of a web site.

Thanks to the SAT tools, the productivity level become unreachable by traditional methods.

Overall diagram of use

After a usual study work (step 1 to 3), the use of SAT requires only three light and quick steps to give value to available results after the step 3.

1. Demand of study
2. Modeling/Simulation – concepts, physics, technology
3. Results in form of curves

4. Light 3D modeling (SketchUp)
5. Association of values and attributes
6. Automatic animation of the 3D model and video production
7. Presentation of results on a web site
(Control of the Intellectual Property, simplified sharing with all the participants)

The diagram below shows how SimFonIA SAT suite allows to associate results from the industrial and scientific research with 3D models in order to obtain distribuable videos and animations :

One simple example

A teacher wants to illustrate the free fall of a ball, the mechanics of the bounce, the conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy, the distortion, its own mode of oscillation, the energy losses etc.
The usual method of equations and curves drawn on blackboard is multi-secular. From now on, the SAT tools easily allows to make phenomena both tangible and understandable for everyone.

Steps 1,2,3: Classical approaches: Model, simulation, curves, file

Step 4: 3D drawing

Step 5: Association of values and attributes

Step 6: Animations and production of video (click to see the animation)

Step 7: Web site

Videos of illustration

Here we have some videos to illustrate the use of the SAT tools. These videos were produced by using data from up-to-date simulators such as Matlab, SMASH, Portunus, Excel …and some of them with multiple sources.

SimFonIA Animation Tools preview (Camera control, 3D Warehouse compatibility, Physics engine ‘Bullet’, Processors of color, transformation, deformation, animator)

Ball 7 (comparison of modeling levels)	Tramway Pantograph (study of the docking, the detachment, the withdrawal and the influences on the embedded electronic system)	AutoFocus Complex mechatronic system (electronic, optic, mechanic, electrotechnic, regulation, thermic)
Play LEGO ® (automatic system assembly)	Air Show	Heart (deformable surfaces)
Integrated circuit cell of MEMS (feasibility of a controllable MEMS based on the polymer sheet)	Wave power plant (parametric study to optimise energy productions)	LOGO SimFonIA (utilize Bullet Physics ©)

Export 3D on a web page

The animations can be exported in a format which is compatible with the web. So The user can replay these animations of manipulable 3D models in a standard web page based on HTML 5 and WebGL (without supplymentary plug-ins).

The following two videos illustrate the use of a web site in order to make the animations available to a community (project groups, technical partners, clients, prospects). The model remains manipulable in 3D and the animations can be re-played while manipulating the curves in various modes.

Pantograph and radial engine

Mechatronic AutoFocus System: study of two regulations

Demonstration Web site

Information

This product is developed with the support of the CEDRAT society in the frame of the ANR-MoCoSyMec Project (ANR-08-COSI-006-04)

This product is compatible with the Portunus software of Adapted-Solutions