Ah yeah, there's no way to preview animations besides using a test scene designed for that.
Try checking out some of the example scenes! STM has a "vertexmod" event that can me used to do additional animations. Try attaching the "STMvertexmod" component to an object and hooking up one of its methods to STM's vertexmod event. The "sketchify" one is very popular, and I've used this method to bend STM along a curve, before.
What kind of animations did you have in mind, though?