Hello eveybody,

This is to let you know about a tutorial I made regarding how to make 
animations using POV under RedHat 7.3.  The page focuses on 
visualization of chemical quantities (vibrational modes, to be exact), 
but the info on how to take the frames and turn them to mpegs or 
animated gifs is pretty general and may be useful to a wider audience.

The URL is:

http://www.geocities.com/quimico69/povray/Jmol_to_mpeg_tutorial.html

Comments welcome.

Victor

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Hi, thx for this howto.

Perhaps i can give you some adds:

Kpovmodeler is absolutely stable and comfortable for making .povs
Look at "povray.binaries.images" for an example i did with it..

With "mencoder" from "mplayer" you can easily make animations out of single
pictures or other formats to divX, mpg, avi, etc....

It supports over 160 (!!) codecs in my installation...

------------------------------------------------

My greatest difficulty was, to find out the spline for the camera and the
"look_at" until i did it like that:

1. Take an visual modeler (kpovmodeler)
2. add the basic shapes of my scene
3. put 2 blobs in it
4. put in the first blob some balls that represent the camera-path
5. put some cylinders in the second blob for the "look_at"-point
6. as an option of blob, it is rendered smooth along the blobs, so it is easy to
see the resulting path.
7. Export it to ".pov"
8. extract the blobs and the points out of it
9. make the camera/look_at-spline with it

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> With "mencoder" from "mplayer" you can easily make animations out of
> single pictures or other formats to divX, mpg, avi, etc....
> 
> It supports over 160 (!!) codecs in my installation...
> 
But it can only _play_ 160 codecs, not encode them all, right?

Furthermore, it cannot encode multiple PNG files unless you 
patch it in some crude way... (Took me several hours.)

Wolfgang

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> But it can only _play_ 160 codecs, not encode them all, right?

You're right, but encodes more than 20 codecs...

> Furthermore, it cannot encode multiple PNG files unless you
> patch it in some crude way... (Took me several hours.)

Just wrong. I did it like that ("mencode -mf someOptions:file=png").

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Florian Rustedt wrote:
>> Furthermore, it cannot encode multiple PNG files unless you
>> patch it in some crude way... (Took me several hours.)
> 
> Just wrong. I did it like that ("mencode -mf someOptions:file=png").
>
Yes but that does only work with divx for me. When using 
lavc, the swscaler has to be used for colorspace conversion 
and it introduces heavy disortion. You can get the same effect 
by using (IIRC)
  mplayer -vo xv -mf on:w=640:h=480:fps=25:type=png "f000*.png" -vop rgb2bgr 

In case you know how to encode multiple png files using 
  -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4
I'd be very happy to know. 

Wolfgang

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> In case you know how to encode multiple png files using
>   -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4
> I'd be very happy to know.

Just begin with a step-in-between, making a "rawrgb"-avi.
Then take the result as source and do whatever you want, no distortion then.

Be happy ;-)

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Florian Rustedt wrote:
> Just begin with a step-in-between, making a "rawrgb"-avi.
> Then take the result as source and do whatever you want, no distortion
> then.
> 
Okay... but that's inacceptable for me because of the size of 
the raw AVI. 
I am using compressed PNGs and don't want to inflate the 
complete film before finally compressing it. 

The best solution then is probably to fix mencoder...

Wolfgang

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Florian Rustedt <flo### [at] rustedtde> wrote in
news:3f156891@news.povray.org: 

> My greatest difficulty was, to find out the spline for the
> camera and the "look_at" until i did it like that:
> 
> 1. Take an visual modeler (kpovmodeler)
> 2. add the basic shapes of my scene
> 3. put 2 blobs in it
> 4. put in the first blob some balls that represent the
> camera-path
> 5. put some cylinders in the second blob for the
> "look_at"-point 
> 6. as an option of blob, it is rendered smooth along the
> blobs, so it is easy to see the resulting path. 
> 7. Export it to ".pov"
> 8. extract the blobs and the points out of it
> 9. make the camera/look_at-spline with it


This seems interesting, do you have a visual example of one
of your blob placements so that I may better understand you r
technique? 

Kpovmodeler is for unix only from what I see, it looked
interesting :( 

Thanks

-- 
Marc Champagne
marcch.AT.videotron.DOT.ca
Montreal, CANADA

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