BoDonna wrote:

>   thank you for  the animation tutorial Ken !
>                 I was wondering if you or someone else could go one step
> further and do a mini-tutorial on Dave's Targa Animator. It seems this
> programs runs in DOS(Dark Ominous Space ) and does not make sense to me
> after reading the Read Me file.
>                Maybe a step-by-step of the above scene would be cool.
>                Is there a WIN95 program that inputs/outputs the same files
> as DTA or if not, maybe some skilled programmer could design one. If Taps
> could do it for a Height-field generator why can't they make something for
> Animation??
>
>                                     thanks for listening
>                                           GAR

  I think I can offer you something a little better that my command line options

for DTA.

    Take a look in the POV-Ray docs under section 3 which describes
the use of .ini files with POV-Ray. Then in one of your POV-Ray
subdirectories you find an .ini file called tgafli.ini. This was written by
those incredible members of the pov team that seem to somehow think
of everything. When activated this .ini file will allow you to render however
many frames you specified in the final frames section, then it will
automatically
call DTA, and then compile your animation for you using DTA. You can
edit this file to change the final animation size, resolution, and type. Using
the
format of this .ini file you can use it as a foot print to call other animation
packages
to compile your rendered frames.

    You asked about other animation packages and there are several available.
One I'm falling in love with is a shareware package called Main Actor.
I think the URL for this is http://www.mainconcept.de but if it doesn't work
I'm not responsible. It's 100 degrees F here today and my brain hurts.
Another favorite of many people is called Video For DOS of VFD. It
is of course another dos based program.

    If you absolutely must have some DTA parameters to pass to the DTA
program here are some that should work but mind you I'm doing this
from memory and as such might fail miserably.

    Let's assume you have named you animation test.pov. You have told
POV-Ray to render 10 frames for this animation. You wait until POV-Ray
has finished rendering these ten frames.

    Somewhere on your drive you now have ten .tga files.
They will be listed as test001.tga, test002.tga, test003.tga ... etc.
Pov automatically adds the extra three digits for you as it renders each one.
Copy or move them to where you have DTA installed if it is different from
where the tga files are located.

Go to that directory and type the following at a dos prompt:

dta test*. /otest

This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory called test
and to produce an animation called test.fli

dta test*. /a1 /otest

This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory starting with test,
take the average between 1 frames (read the dta docs for more info)
and then produce an animation called test.fli. Average is a nice option
for creating motion blur : )

dta test*. /x2 /otest

Same as above but instead expands each frame by looking at the objects
position in the image and the position in the frames before and after the
frame it's working on (again the dta docs can explain it better than I can).
Your original 10 frames are now expanded to 20 (30 ?) frames.
This function can help smooth out the gaps between images in your
animation. This also can be a powerful feature. Use this when doing test
renderings for your animations. Ten frames is usually considered
too low a number to get a good animation. But if you just want a quick
preview, render ten quick frames, and use the expand command and it will
do a good job of showing you what your animation would look like if you
rendered many more frames.


dta test*. /s200  /otest

This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory called test
and slow down the playback of your animation to a speed of 200
milliseconds per frame (I'm not sure how this is implemented but it works).
You will find on many of the shorter animations that you try to produce
they seem to play back way to fast to be useful. Use this command to slow
your animation down. A range of /s50 to /s300 is a good place to start
until you understand the option.

Well that about sucks me dry for information on animations and using
DTA. If I seem to have missed something let me know and I'll see
if I can fill in the blanks.

Happy raytracing and enjoy your new found skills.

K.Tyler

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