David Vincent-Jones <geo### [at] galaxynetcom> wrote:
> I am looking for an example of an animation where the camera moves in
> something other than a simple lineal fashion. I am creating a walk
through
> where I want to be able to go around objects and generally move in a
non
> linear form.

There are a number of ways to create non-linear animations (whether of
the camera, objects, textures, whatever...).  If your animation is
completely non-linear, then you could actually have a separate scene for
every frame, with things positioned and altered as desired.  Obviously,
though, this is less than a practical solution!  Instead, what you'll
probably want is to define your animation actions as functions of
POV-Ray's clock value.  Parametising your animations in this way means
you can change the frame-rate and still have predictable, accurate
movements.

Now, POV-Ray offers plenty of mathematical and vector functions and it's
possible to use these to animate just about any action desired, eg:

  camera {location 0 direction z
    translate vrotate(vrotate(-x, y*90*pow(clock, 3))*<3, 0, 2>, x*15)}

Here the camera accelerates (the power function) along a quarter of an
elliptical arc (from x*-3 to z*2) which is then inclined by 15 degrees
to the XZ plane.

On the other hand, if you want a simpler way of approaching the problem
you could look at my Automatic Clock Modifier macro file:

   http://www.geocities.com/ccolefax

The macros allow you to define actions using a simple, step-by-step
syntax, and you can modify the clock to create
accelerations/decelerations, waves, oscillations, jumps, bounces,
recoils, etc.  The macros can be used wherever vectors or floats would
normally be used (controlling any numerical aspect of your scene), and
you can also animate pigments, textures, and other map entries by
specifying targets and transitions.

Also on my site is the Spline include file, which lets you animate
movements along smoothly interpolated Bezier curves.  However, the file
was designed for POV-Ray 3.0 and a new, vastly-improved macro version is
currently on the way (a preview animation of an animated vehicle tracks
system can be found on the binaries.animations group).

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