After calculating the wave surface (see Rendered view on page 33), Seakeeper is able to animate the vessel for the specified initial roll decay angle or in the selected wave pattern. Choose Display | Animate to start the animation and use the Escape (Esc) key to terminate the animation.

Animation of the vessel motions may be displayed when either a regular or irregular wave surface has been calculated. If you try to animate the model with a flat free-surface, you will get the following error message:

If a wavy surface has been calculated, the animate dialog will be displayed; this gives you the option of saving the time series data to a text file. The text file contains the statistics and time series for wave elevation and heave, roll and pitch motions.

By default, the animation is displayed in real time; the frame rate is adapted so that the animation is in real time. If you have a slow computer or graphics card (hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics cards will generally increase the frame rate) then the frame rate may be too low to provide a reasonable animation. If this is the case you can reduce the attempted play back speed; use the keypad “-” key to slow down the animation which will increase the frame rate, or use the keypad “+” key to speedup the animation which will reduce the frame rate.

The instantaneous time, heave, roll and pitch are displayed in the status bar when the animation takes place:

The vessel heading, speed and wave spectrum used in the animation is selected from the pull down boxes in the Results toolbar (only results that have actually been evaluated may be chosen):

It is not possible to save the animation directly, however, you can use an external application to capture the animation.