"Carl Hoff" <hof### [at] wtnet> wrote in message news:40329b88@news.povray.org...
> > And I'm posting it here so I don't get backed into a corner
> > (pun intended) alone while trying to help him.
>
> Arg!!! Arg!!! Arg!!! I'm so sorry about that.  Darn Outlook
> Express has the "Reply Group" button right next to the "Reply"

You're not the only one. Maybe we can blame this button-pushing world.

> The bike only leaves a permanent trail when its on the game
> grid.  With a little digging I'm sure I could find a nice screen
> grab from the movie. But here is a picture I've already made
> with POV-Ray.  Check it out:
>
> http://www.tron-sector.com/gallery/show.aspx?ID=1037
>
> I can make just about any still image I want and now I'm
> trying to to take a stab at animation.

You do stills very well. I've seen some of this from you already.

> > Growing the trail along as the bike moves... guess that
> > could be done... maybe by giving the sphere_sweep the
> > number of points as 'frame_number'. Or at least some
> > integer based on it. Then the points could be gathered
> > from an 'array', previously set up, invoking them via a
> > 'while' loop which uses the point count to pull them out
> > of the array.
> >
> > Make sense?
>
> Yes... I think so.  But I'm not sure I can pull that off.

Now I have tried while-looping the spline into the sphere_sweep. The thing
drew out a line alright, except it apparently only used the first and last
points. Nothing inbetween. As you might have a look at yourself using the
previous script and this in place of its sphere_sweep:


#local Frame=frame_number;
#local Points=0;

sphere_sweep {
 linear_spline
 Frame+1, // must have at least two points
 SpaceTime(0),1 // starting point
 #while (Points<Frame)
 SpaceTime(clock),1 // only last recognized?
 #local Points=Points+1;
 #end
pigment {color red 1}
}


If this were capable of storing each and every vector given it from the
spline and loop I think it'd work fine.

Bob H.

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