in news:414b1a41$1@news.povray.org Rune wrote:

> //               name    sound_filename    time
> sound_point_loop("ball","wavdata/bump.wav",1000*3.5)
> 

Rune,

Just shooting some stuff that comes up in me. 

What was your perception of the process when you started?
 
I would think of two things, "tracks" and "time-line". Tracks would be 
what you call sound_point, think of multi track recording. Every object 
has its own track.

The time-line tells us what happens when. In your current macro it seems 
that you define start and end time, so you have to know the length of 
the whole sequence on beforehand. I'd prefer the data on the time-line 
to be independent of the actual length of the sequence, so one does not 
have to change values if one does a "10 frame test run".

Track("ship1", position, trigger)
This could be the simplest form of the macro and writes a line like:

- ship1, startframe, endframe, currentframe, position, sound_on/off

From a complete dataset like this, you Java program could figure out 
everything needed, like calculating a time-code from the frame data. 
Leave out as much information as possible. It gives you maximum 
flexibility in case you wan't to change something later on, like gain or 
pitch. These are properties of the sound not of the object.

//               name    sound_filename    time
sound_point_loop("ball","wavdata/bump.wav",1000*3.5)

This one could become:
Track("ball", position, trigger)

The Java program should know the relation ball -> bump.wav, not POV-Ray. 
The Java script should know the sound-properties of the ball-object, 
like should I start the sound one frame, or n milliseconds, before or 
after the impact. Should it still have a sound some time after it 
bounced, etc. Also you could do some extra calculations in POV-Ray to 
determine wether the trigger should switch from off to on.

So you may have to write two scripts, a POV-script and a sound script.

This is more or less what also happens during real filming. Sound and 
image are recorded sepparately, have two time-lines and time-codes are 
used to match things. When making (multi screen) slide shows it is even 
custom to first make the sound track and then match the timing of the 
slides to that.

As said, just my thoughts, so don't be bothered too much with them. It's 
your project.


Ingo

Post a reply to this message