CalculiX GraphiX is a software tool developed to generate finite element (FE) models and visualize the results computed by CalculiX CrunchiX (ccx).

Displaying and saving short videos or animations of simulation results is often helpful for analysis and presentation purposes.

One of the most effective ways to share or quickly visualize simulation results is by saving them as GIF or AVI animation files.

For this purpose, CalculiX GraphiX provides a dedicated procedure within its graphical user interface (GUI).

Assuming your simulation is named bellow, open a terminal and run the cgx executable to load the result file bellow.frd:

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cgx bellow.frd

Check whether your simulation contains multiple load steps and sub-steps:

Use the ds command to load the available load steps and sub-steps:

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ds 2 5 119 e 7

This command means: 2 the first set, 119 the last and 5 defines the interval between steps. The letter 'e' stands for entity and the number 7 correspond to the Von Mises stress.

The corresponding animation will now begin:

Now, it's time to save the animation. However, to avoid potential errors, it's important to understand how cgx operates. In fact, cgx relies on imageMagik to crop, convert, and assemble the saved images into a single GIF file. Therefore, you need to have imageMagik installed on your system, whether you are using Windows or Linux. In the next section, we will guide you through the installation process.

On Linux, simply run the following command in the terminal:

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sudo apt install imagemagick

Even with imageMagik correctly installed, cgx may occasionally produce errors. This is because, starting from imageMagik version 7 and above, the utilities mogrify, convert and composite have been integrated into the main executable magik.

To resolve this issue, the cleanest solution is to create symbolic links in the /usr/bin directory:

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sudo ln -s /usr/bin/magick /usr/bin/mogrify
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/magick /usr/bin/convert
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/magick /usr/bin/composite

The same procedure must be applied on Windows. Install imageMagik from the official download page, and create the following .bat files, making sure they are accessible through your system's environment variables:

• mogrify.bat
• convert.bat
• composite.bat

mogrify.batCopy

@echo off
magick mogrify %*

convert.batCopy

@echo off
magick convert %*

composite.batCopy

@echo off
magick composite %*

Your animations are now ready to be viewed and shared.