The resent post by Tom Galvin about animation got me thinking :-)

I have made a very primitive plugin to animate things using Pov's clock.
Moray's material editor's 'direct code' (tested)
InsertCode plugin (Luis) (not tested)

There is no error checking yet, so it's not linked from my website yet.
There is an animated gif on the sample page.
http://ca.geocities.com/morayplugin/

In Moray:
Code an object or material with the clock value.
Unselect the actuate checkbox.
Render scene.
Select the actuate checkbox.
Render scene.
Goto POV-Ray and run the ini file.
The resulting ini/inc/pov files hold the complete animation.

The plugin will let you select/input:
Final_Clock
Final_Frame
Initial_Clock
Initial_Frame
Subset_End_Frame
Subset_Start_Frame
Cyclic_Animation
Field_Render
Odd_Field
Output_File_Name
ini file name(the name of the current scene)

When the scene is rendered the generated pov code will append the options to
the end of the ini file with file i/o directives (#fopen,#write,#fclose). It
will also create a 'filename'_status.txt file so the resulting animation
won't keep on appending.

If you are interested in taking a look at it, respond to this thread/e-mail
me asking for the link.

Actuate1a.zip
  Actuate.lua (plain text file)
  testjunk_Actuate.mdl (moray file used to generate testjunk)
  testjunk.gif (animated gif, assembled with PSP7 from 11 png files)

Comments welcome

Stephen

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