> Yeah, like at least how many rendering sequences it took to make it.
> Really great stuff especially considering the difficulty involved with the
> limited tools POV-Ray has.  Any Moray IK in there?
>
> >   Now you must tell us how the **** did you do that... :)

The animation is 423 frames, all rendered in one shot, though I had to restart
once or twice because there were a few frames missing.  This is the result of
months of work on writing an exporter for Animation Master that will convert
models to .pov format - something that I've been determined to do because I
firmly believe that POV-Ray isn't limited as a renderer, it just needs a good
modeller and animation tool to go with it.

This was intended as a test to see how well it worked and didn't involve all
that much work on my part.  The model is one that comes on the animation master
CD with a mocap action applied to it.  The only real work I did on it was
setting it up in A:M, exporting the frames to sequenced .incs, write a little
script to read them in as the clock increase, a little touching up of the
materials, and some keyframing of the spotlight using Colefax's autoclck.mcr.
Oh, and some tweaking of the media and rendering using my media patch so it
would go faster.

I came to this point after getting many requests to add features to a RIB
exporter I wrote.  It was going along pretty well when I realized that there
were certain quirks of RIB that would make the project impossible to accomplish
without writing a whole bunch of other tools like render managers and shaders
managers - long story short, it's my personal belief now that POV is better
than RIB for my purposes.

I intend to release the exporter once I've touched it up a bit.  Here's
basically how it works:

Model and animate in A:M and setup a choreography.  Delete everything in the
choreography except the model you want to export.  Export to .pov - you'll get
a dialog asking you the range of frames you want to export.  Give it a name and
then you get a dialog asking if you want to save material info and or texture
maps (the latter will require uv mapping which isn't ready yet).  Then sit back
as it writes all the include files and an include containing all the materials
for the model.

Now you can create a master file for rendering the animation and adding new
items to the scene.  Only two lines are needed to add in the include files -
here's the one for this animation:

#declare CURRENT_FRAME = clock;

#include concat("yurika",str(CURRENT_FRAME,0,0) )

So for 400 frames the clock goes to 399.  I put it at the bottom so that the
model is included last.  Then I open up the material files and touch them up so
that the model is looking just how I want it.  After that you can add
absolutely anything to the file.  Say you had a whole scene layed out in A:M -
the elements that are static can be exported once and included in the file.

The best part is that this is very easy on memory.  Since the materials are
stored in a seperate file, you can just make a backup and copy it back over to
the home directory after exporting more frames for rendering.  The work flow is
really slick.

That's about all there is to it so far.  I plan on polishing up everything I've
done so far and get to work on doing original models and animations with this.
A release of the exporter could come by the end of the month, though I still
need to wrap up (so I don't have to worry about it anymore) what I have done
already for RIB for the poor saps who use those kinds of programs.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:  POV-Ray is awsome!

-Mike

Post a reply to this message