I've a silly little animation that I tweak every now and then and
re-render. Because the PC's I use often have to be stopped so that
they can do some "proper work" I have resorted to numerous techniques
to re-start the rendering at the appropriate point (especially since
the person re-starting the rende risn't always me - but sometimes the
wife).

This has brought to mind a possible "improvement" to the way I
currently do this, but I can't see any way of realising it (thus far)
even with a macro.

At present POV always parses a scene, creates bounding slabs, maybe
vector and light buffers, before checking to see if there's a file of
the appropriate name already in place. What I'd *like* to do is to be
able to extract the name of the "about to be rendered" file, increment
it by one, use some (non-existant so far as I can currently find)
"IFEXISTS" command to see if the current _and_ next frame exist. If
that's true then a variable (e.g. ffast) can be set to true and the
POV script can check it and produce a minimal scene for parsing
instead of the full scene. It then whips past all the "full, finished"
frames and only starts parsing the full scene description when it
approaches the end of the segment.

This approach has flaws even if it could be implimented without
patching the code. If someone had to patch the POV code in order to
get "IFEXISTS" functionality then a better approach might be to check
that the current frame file is a complete, finished file - skipping
all of these until the first non-existant or incomplete bitmap is
located and then parsing from that point onwards.

It's not a major headache - when I'm doing the re-starting I can
change the start and end frames in the .ini file I use - but something
along these lines would, I feel, be at least some benefit.


Cheers,

Cliff Bowman
Why not pay my 3D Dr Who site a visit at http://www.who3d.cwc.net/
PS change ".duffcom" to ".net" if replying via e-mail

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