How to create Sequential Animation of Polylines in ArcGIS10?

Question

I have a data set consisting of sets of polylines which reflect movement of individual organisms in my sample within their habitat each day. I am trying to create an animation which cycles through the days, displaying only the movement for one day at a time.

When I try to do this in ArcGIS10, it adds the lines from each day onto a map containing the lines from all previous days. How can I get the previous days' lines to disappear when the time slider moves to the next day?

Answer 1

I was able to get this to work by doing the following:

• I created a new feature class of type line that I called TestLines with one date field I called MovementDate

• I created three line features, the second and third starting from the ends of the first and second, and then put movement dates of 9/1/13, 10/1/13 and 11/1/13 (Australian date format so these represent 9-11 Jan)

• I made the settings below on the Animation tab of this layer's Properties

• On the Animation toolbar I chose Animation | Create Time Animation

• I then used Animation | Animation Manager to open the Animation Manager where the Track tab confirmed that I had one Time Animation Track

• On the Keyframes tab of the Animation Manager there were two Time Keyframes for 9/1/13 and 11/1/13 so I used the Create button to make another one for 10/1/13, the arrows to get it in the right time order, and also set the Interval and Units for each to be 1 day

• I then hit Open Animation Controls on the Animation toolbar and made the settings below. I also hit the Calculate button.

• Final step was to hit the Play button on the Animation Controls and what I observed was the first day's movement only on for a second, then the second day's movement on for a second, then the third day's movement on for a second, followed by all three days movement at once which stayed on.