Making it move

When pictures just aren't enough

Admitted, this one was mostly for the fun of it, but like most fun it taught me something useful.

I was at a conference recently, and was rather mesmerised by some of the animations of modelled noise sources. But dBSea does not output animations, so I went the long way and got "Autohotkey", a program that lets you automate repetitive tasks, such as running dBSea's modelling algorithms 90 times over and moving the source in small increments between each image export. 

This process is essentially a batch process (i.e. running similar processes repeatedly), and can be very useful if you wish to run many models while systematically changing the input variables.

The below animation is what I came up with, a boat making it's way into Chesapeake Bay to "Bush Park Camping Resort". Note that the boat is travelling 180 km's in nine seconds (for your viewing pleasure), as the full eighteen hour video was a bit over the top for my laptop.

Boat sailing in through the mouth of Chesapeake Bay

It's important to outline that the results do not differ from using the "Moving source" option in dBSea, but for visual representation this is certainly more eyecatching.

dSBea 2.0 can export animations!

Thank you for reading, please feel free to comment or ask questions below.

Resources:

https://autohotkey.com/

http://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gridded_bathymetry_data/gebco_30_second_grid/