David Parrott wrote:

> However that is about as far as my animations go, I have no idea how
> people do the complex animations, the complexity of mine stand at a
> spinning cube.  If you have any for using straight POV (i.e. not
> ClockMod) for complex animations I would be very grateful.

 Complex animations only differ from simple animations in the way that
you divide up the clock value. To have different operations occurring
at different times within the clock period you need a way to divide
that time period.

 For example if you have the clock set to run from 0 - 1 you can specify
that a ball rolls across the floor from clock 0 - 0.2. It will then stop
and something else will happen from clock 0.2 - 0.5 and so on. By dividing
up the clock this way over a large number of frames, and with many different
object affected by these timing variations, very complex animations can be
made.

  So your challenge comes not so much in controlling a single object rather
you need to learn how to control your object based on the clocks period.
To get a basic feel for this, one portion of the animation tutorial in the
POV-Ray docs describes how to roll a ball across the floor, stop and change
directions, then come back across the floor again. This little bit of the
tutorial shows you some of the ways that you can effectively divide the
clock period into separate actions.

 Once you have learned how to control the clock then it is time to learn
the intricacies of learning how to use that control with object movement.
This is where you can make good use of rotations, translations, while loops,
and many of the specialized math functions available in the program to
give your objects  or camera complex movement patterns.

  Going beyond this I advise you to look at the tutorials section of the
links in my sig for online animation tutorials that go into this subject
in greater detail. On that is particularly good is the one by Steve Strickland
that is based on Chris Colefax's clockmod include file. Steve put a lot of
effort into that tutorial and it introduces you to some of the more advanced
techniques that you will need to use to make impressive animations with.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

Post a reply to this message