Hi. I have a problem that should be easy to solve for those who've spent
more time with POV than myself. I simply can't make POV animate anything at
all. The clock variable is set to 1.0, I've tried running all sorts of
tutorials, and example files that came with pov, and all it does is render
the first frame. Or, the last frame, to be more exact. If I, for example,
use "rotate 45*clock*y", on an object it displays the object rotated 45
degrees, and does nothing else.

When I look through the messages it says (Animation off). None of the
tutrials describe how to turn it on. Not even the SLD help files, as far as
I can tell.
I'm using 3.1g, the latest version.

Strangely, I remember from earlier versions, that I just loaded an example
file and it animation worked fine.

Could anyone help me?

Isak Lundin Sweden

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Hi. 

This is really easy and certainly described in the docs (what about
searching in them?), but just to repeat...

Animation cannot work from just within a scene file. You'll always
need an ini file which includes at least the following lines:

--------------------Start INI File---
Initial_Frame=1 ; any numbers
Final_Frame=10
Initial_Clock=0
Final_Clock=1
Input_File_Name=myscene.pov ; your scene
--------------------End INI File---

When you make POV-Ray rendering this file, an animation will be
created. 
Of course, you can set additional options in this INI file, such as
Width, Height, Antialias, etc.

Hope this helps...
Florian Fischer

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Isak Lundin wrote:
> 
> Hi. I have a problem that should be easy to solve for those who've spent
> more time with POV than myself. I simply can't make POV animate anything at
> all. The clock variable is set to 1.0, I've tried running all sorts of
> tutorials, and example files that came with pov, and all it does is render
> the first frame. Or, the last frame, to be more exact. If I, for example,
> use "rotate 45*clock*y", on an object it displays the object rotated 45
> degrees, and does nothing else.

I'm hoping you are using the windows version. From the tools menu choose
to edit the master povray.ini file. Add the following to the ini file.
To activate the clock feature uncomment the lines that apply to what you
want to do. The minimum you need to specify is the Initial_Frame and
Final_Frame which tells POV-Ray how many frames of the animation you wish
to render. After you adjust the parameters to your needs and they are
uncommented the clock function will now work for you. Do not forget to
comment those lines again when you are through running your animation or
scenes without a clock variable will render the same scene by whatever
amount you have specified for the final frame.

Also read up in the docs if you wish to see what the command line switches
are for these same functions. Some people prefer to activate these functions
from the command line instead of from within an .inin file. Your choice.

;clock=1
;Initial_Frame=1
;Final_Frame=20
;Cyclic_Animation = on
;Subset_Start_Frame=6
;Subset_End_Frame=10

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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Thanks! Well, I've never done much ini-file changing, so... :)
Works fine now! And thank you both for answering so quickly, it's been
bugging me for some time, next time I'll check the help file a bit better
before starting to search the web :)

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It still is easier to type this in the command line field of the render
options:

+kff10

  It will create 10 frames.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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