"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message 
news:48b38879$1@news.povray.org...
> So I know that for still images, I can export from Poser (or, in my case, 
> Daz Studio).  However, what if I want to do animations?  What are the best 
> tools for this?
>
> I'm guessing that most people who animate characters don't use POV, but 
> I'm not most people :)
>
> ...Chambers

Hi Ben,

You may want to add a few more words about what you're trying to achieve. 
Animating good looking human figures with hair, clothes etc. in POV-Ray is 
still tricky, but if you're only after little robots or toon characters it 
can be a lot easier.

I think you're right that most people don't animate human characters 
directly in POV-Ray. I wrote a set of macros (see 
http://www.geocities.com/povperson/), but they are cumbersome to use (I 
don't think anyone else has ever mastered using them). Others have also done 
stuff of their own (see 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TvoYMHyCV0&feature=user) but I don't recall 
seeing the code for that published at all. Rune has published a little 
walking macro and Teresa Willis did WilBot and son of Wilbot back in 1997 
(see http://www.jbarchuk.com/twillis/) which implements a walking macro. 
Otherwise there's an old Blobman macro for POV-Ray 3.1 that I think someone 
used to construct an animation recently, but it's ugly.

I think the best human animations I've seen done in POV-Ray to date were 
done frame by frame by exporting a large number of poses from Poser or Daz 
(or from some other modeller for toon-style or robot-style characters). Mike 
Williams wrote a Poser to POV tutorial at 
http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/posetut/index.htm back in 2003. Someone did a 
very nice animation of a lady walking in a circle a long time ago using this 
sort of technique, but I can't find that right now. This approach can also 
be very cumbersome.

Recently I've been looking at MakeHuman which seems to me to have the most 
future potential. It's an Open Source human modeller with a Python API that 
I'm currently helping to document. Once I've done that, I'm interested in 
exploring the possibilities of developing an API to generate POV-Ray meshes 
and poses directly (still early days).

Regards,
Chris B.

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