Xmovie is an X-based visualization package that can reads particle data in a simple text format. LAMMPS output files are in this format (by default). Xmovie displays 2d projections of 3d (or 2d) data sets. While simple, it is extremely fast, and often useful for debugging.

Xmovie was written by Mike Uttormark, while visiting Sandia, in the summer of 1994. Subsequent small changes have been made by Steve Plimpton.

To make xmovie for your platform, edit the top section of the Makefile appropriately for your machine. You will need to point at the correct X libraries for xmovie to compile and link properly.

Once you have an xmovie executable you can test it by typing:

xmovie dummy.dat

A control window and a display window should pop open. Move the "thickness" slider all the way to the right and click "Start". You should see a small white ball oscillate back and forth in the display.

The examples directory in the LAMMPS distribution has several simulations that can be run with LAMMPS to produce dump.* files that you can use xmovie to visualize. The Movies page of the LAMMPS WWW Site has animations of these simulations that were produced by converting saved xmovie snapshots to MPEG files (via ImageMagick's convert program). Note that LAMMPS output is scaled by default (so all coordinates are from 0 to 1). Thus you need to run xmovie like this:

xmovie -scale dump.*

to see the snapshot you expect.

The xmovie control window options should be self-explanatory. You are always viewing a 2d projection of your 2d or 3d snapshot; the "position" and "thickness" sliders control the range of the slab of atoms being projected. You will not always see a snapshot when xmovie begins, unless you push the "thickness" slider to the right.

Type xmovie to see a list of command-line options and info on file formats.

---

If the xpm.h file is not on a system, it must be downloaded from somewhere

Needed to build on IBM cheetah at ORNL: #include </apps/xpm/3.4k/rs_aix51/include/X11/xpm.h>