During animation the trip/back buttons can effectively be used to return to a point in time where you want to return back to if you wanted to browse around some specific point in time.
You can spend most of the time moving in [o]rbit mode. Left-button moves around chosen center; control-left pans around the sky. As opposed to switching to 't' mode to zoom and translate, you can also use SHIFT-Mouse-1 and SHIFT-Mouse-3 to achieve the same from the other ('o', 'f') modes.
To make an animation, create an executable shell script movie1 with
for example the following commands:
#! /bin/csh -f
#
echo step 0
echo update
echo snapshot
echo step 0.01
echo update
echo snapshot
echo step 0.02
echo update
echo snapshot
echo step 0.03
echo update
echo snapshot
...
async movie1, and it will create files
snap.000.sgi, snap.001.sgi, .... and already with xv a movie
can be shown:
xv -wait 0 snap.???.sgi
To make animated GIFs, here are some examples with common software, all with a default 0.1 sec delay between frames. Some animation software (e.g. xanim) can change these:
convert -delay 10 -loop 0 snap.???.sgi try1.gif
gifsicle -d 10 snap.???.gif > try2.gif
The script will run asynchronously within partiview, so if you then use the mouse to change orientation or zoom, these actions (minus the location of the mouse of course) will be nicely recorded in the snapshots.