Air Flow Animation

but now our marketing guys are asking for ...
_{<slaps furry head with paw....next they'll want the moon on a stick>}

Hmmm I'd animate air as grey dots moving in the direction of flow...by hey what do I know I'm a Cat?

Del

What about animating the movement of electrons down wires, then?

John: 11, 35.

I would say short lines moving along the flowlines.

So where would you use the long ones? And the arrows?

Down Del! Not that sort of arrow....

Where the velocity is faster.

Automation studio has the industries leading software for it.

It might be a good purchase if you do a lot of Pneumatics/Hydraulics stuff.

You might be able to knock something up using phun. These "pellets" are slightly lighter than air: they don't do quite what I expected, but, you get the idea:-

Probably CFD software may help you. Ask the users of such software

First of all, animating schematics pictorially can be a black hole of expense and time. I would tell the marketing guys that first of all, they need to pay 50$ an hour to have it made.

Industry standard is not to animate flow at all, but to provide simple flow arrows, color to show state changes in pumps, valves and equipment, and if multiple scenarios are required, it is faaaar easier to simply copy the drawing and change some flow arrows rather than animate. (put a few buttons on menu bar to allow user to select different flow patterns or scenarios)

with 10 years experience with workstation graphics in the HVAC industry, trust me, unless they are giving you specialized animation software to do this, try your hardest to say no, and if yes, the charge big $$$.

then.. I would use a software like graphworx which is designed for screen based graphics of control systems. (still, animated piping is very rare, and unecessary)

If you are creating sales literature, it is still easier to create stop-frame animations than to try to get dynamics in the graphworx to look right. better off to go with Flash, and still, you will be paying a trained person 50$ an hour to do it...back to square one.

If you have a bitmap of the graphic, and make 50 copies, then you can go into paint, and adjust manually all the pixels in the pipe, and then use a program like BMP2AVI to compile into an avi file.

good luck

Chris

PS... send me your stuff and I will only charge you 40$ an hour...lol

Check out my page and you can see samples of hvac schematics done with arrows. (although a couple were animated with graphworx)