I once was crazy enough to make an animation of 50 frames and screen capture every single frame, take it to Photoshop, save it as .tga, and then used the RAM player in 3DS Max to make a movie file from my image file sequence. Needless to say, not a very efficient way to do this. Currently I'm trying to make kinematc animations using solids from I-DEAS imported in 3DS, but it's a pain to get everything nicely alligned and moving in a correct, mechanical way. Plus that it's impossible to create relations of motions in 3DS. At least not like in the "Mechanical Simulation" task in I-DEAS. Still hopelesly searching for some kind of software that kan make kinematic animations.
There's a "Make Movie" option on the SGI load of I-DEAS, but I don't think this is available for any other UNIX platforms.
I too go the 3DS Max route for animations. But I don't agree that you can't create relations, they do not always seem to give an exact Engineering result but they are very flexible and very powerful.
Plus, the rendering capability is far beyond any of the high-end CAD systems I'm aware of. (Perhaps StudioTools comes close but that's not a parametric solid modeller)
An alternate solution that would allow configs created in I-DEAS to be used in creating an animation would be Vis Mockup. This can be used for good Engineering animations and fly throughs, but it's not even trying to be Photo Realistic.
