I usually set 30 FPS, though mine generally animate much more slowly than this. Number of steps depends on what I'm animating, but when I'm exporting frames, 600 is most common. I never use the GUI for generating these frames though, because I need them generated at a much higher resolution. I generally use a shell script that exports frames at 8K resolution, which I then downscale to 1080p so that they will be nicely anti-aliased.

Doing it this way is slower than it should be, since it can't take advantage of caching from one frame to the next. On the other hand, it allows me to tweak my script to render multiple frames in parallel to take advantage of multiple processor cores, which the animate feature does not.

It would be nice if the animate function could be used to generate and export frames at an arbitrary resolution. This resolution, the default framerate, and the default number of frames should be configurable in preferences. Bonus points if it can output directly to a video encoder, rather than needing to convert from an image sequence. Making an animated gif would be another useful output option.
On Dec 30, 2020, 22:07 -0800, MichaelAtOz oz.at.michael@gmail.com, wrote:

Yes FPS doesn't make any sense as it does an F5 for every frame, so
struggles to do a frame a second. For my 3D printer it would be more than a
minute per frame, so FPH makes more sense!

On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 at 09:06, Troberg troberg.anders@gmail.com wrote:

A timeline running the full width of the preview window would be nice to have. You wouldn't be able to scrub, but at least being able to click around in it would be nice. Of course, it would be great if the caching WAS good enough to allow you to scrub, even if it was only over the range of frames that have already been rendered. Of course, if you don't rotate the view (or if you're controlling the view with the variables like $vpr and $vpt), the frames could be cached as images, which should make scrubbing easy. If you're NOT using those variables, of course, the cached frames would be invalidated as soon as you make any changes to the viewport. They would also be invalidated if you make any functional changes to the code (though edits only to comments and whitespace wouldn't need to invalidate them).
On Dec 31, 2020, 01:06 -0800, Troberg troberg.anders@gmail.com, wrote:

As far as usage, I often use Animation to test/verirfy how a WIP module
behaves over a wide range of parametric values, or even for a finished
module as a demo of how it works and what different parameter values look
like.  In some cases the thing I'm working on is 2D-only or requires no
boolean CSG operations, in which case 60FPS is not an unreasonable target
to set.

The other big use for me is dumping pictures for making into an animated
GIF.  This might be to showcase a design from different angles or with
moving parts, exploding/assembling animations, illustrating some abstract
geometry problem, or even just for fun/artsy GIFs.
I do end up using GIMP to create the final GIF, so a way to export to GIF
directly from OpenSCAD would be great (or even better Animated PNG)

Here's my ideas for improvement:

• A pause/play toggle button is probably the most sorely missed feature,
  add a button to the toolbar + assign a keyboard shortcut for it.  The one
  weird trick I've been using is to keep my text cursor in the FPS box, and
  append a - character to the end of the value, which makes it invalid and
  pauses the animation, then backspace to resume.

• Instead of having some default presets of FPS and Steps or tucking the
  default away into the Preferences menu, I feel like it would be enough to
  just automatically save and restore those values from their last usage.

• For more mouse-friendliness, make the FPS and step boxes into spinboxes
  with up and down arrows, much like the customizer.

• An interactive timeline slider would also be great, and could possibly
  replace the "Time" input text box.

• I could be wrong, but I think that last time I looked at the code, the
  FPS setting does something like a simple delay of (1000 / FPS) ms, and
  doesn't subtract the time taken to render the previous frame.  It should be
  more like delay(max(0, 1000/FPS - time_elapsed_since_last_frame)), that way
  if your animation can't keep up to target frame rate, at least it won't
  waste any time sleeping.  Sometimes I set FPS to an absurdly high number
  like 1e9 to make any added delay negligible, but doing that also can make
  the view flicker (I think the GLView may be getting cleared and repainted
  at the start of each frame's preview; would be best to just repaint only
  when the next frame is ready and don't clear it beforehand).

• On that note, I've also kinda wanted to be able to see some feedback on
  the actual effective FPS vs the target FPS, which could possibly be
  displayed in the bottom status bar next to viewport settings.

Hans

On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 3:20 PM Jordan Brown openscad@jordan.maileater.net
wrote:

I would just like a way to configure animation from the command-line, and have it dump a bunch of animation frame PNG files. That way I can generate animations for my documentation generation scripts in a far less time consuming manner. I currently have to generate each frame with a separate OpenSCAD run.

-Revar