I've been working on a system to make it possible to easily composite 3D
sound for POV-Ray animations. By 3D sound I mean sound which is in stereo
and which also automatically gets louder when the source of the sound gets
closer to the camera. Dobbler effect is also implemented.

My first test animation can be seen/heard in povray.binaries.animations.
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.animations/thread/%3C414adb2a%40news.povray.org%3E/

The system works this way: In your POV-Ray scene you set up the sound with
some macros. (An example is shown together with the test animation.) An
include file then writes a data text file to the disc while your scene is
rendering frame by frame. The text file contains data about where the camera
and the sources of sound are at each point in time, and which wav-files to
play from which sources at which times. This text file can then be read by a
java program that I've written which then creates an output stereo wav-file.

However, designing the system in a way which makes it both flexible and easy
to use requires some thought. The system as it is now is functional but
rather crude. Therefore I could really need help with designing the system
in a good way. I need help from people experienced with writing complex
systems of macros, java programmers and people who have a habit of thinking
"ah, the syntax of this feature could have been designed in a much cleverer
way". Here of some of my design problems:

- How should the user specify the sound information?

- How can the system be made to work both for clock-based animations and
frame-based animations (typically simulations with I/O)?

- How should the specification of the data file be? The current one is
somewhat a mess.

- How does one make a java program easy to use by others who don't know what
to do with .java and .class files? There should be a good solution to this,
but I'm not experienced in this area.

- How can I make the java program more clean and well-structured? How does
one write a text parser? (The current one is a hack.)

If there is sufficient interest, I'll upload the files somewhere for others
to look at.

Rune
-- 
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
rune|vision:  http://runevision.com
POV-Ray Ring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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