Does anyone know how to do morphing in POV-Ray?

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What are you trying to morph?

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Steven Jones wrote in message <3739F723.8C76946C@tsn.cc>...
>Does anyone know how to do morphing in POV-Ray?
>

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Steven Jones wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know how to do morphing in POV-Ray?

  Chris Colefax has this on his list of things to do but there is
nothing available right now, that I am aware of, that can do what
you ask. You might take a look at the povray.binaries.utilities
group and look for the extrusion macros posted there about a month
ago. There were two, one by Gilles Tran, the second (the authors
name escapes me right now) of the two that offered some form of
morphing ability. I have not had time to check it out and cannot
offer any more than that.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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You can look for dmorf by David K. Mason. Maybe dearmad has it on his
site? :)

GrimDude
vos### [at] arkansasnet

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Actually Chris Colefax's mesh macro supports morphing. The only
requirement is that you have meshes with the same number of triangles,
since morphing is obtained by interpolating between the position of the
mesh vertices. Even if you don't use the mesh macro, some basic morphing
between meshes is more simple that it seems provided you have all the
vertices stored in arrays : if V1 is the array containing the vertices
in mesh 1 and V2 the array of the vertices in mesh 2 then the vertex i
of the morphed form at clock time t is V[i]=V1[i]+ t*(V2[i]-V1[i]) (same
for the normals if you use smooth triangles).
I guess that morphing between meshes with different triangle counts
shouldn't be impossible.

Morphing between CSG objects made of other pov primitives could be much
more difficult, unless you want to morph between two objects defined by
the same set of parameters : you can morph between a sphere and a box
using the superellipsoid primitive for instance. I guess the isosurface
patch could be used to morph between many math objects by interpolating
one function into another (hmm I'll just have to try that, could be
fun). Morphing between blobs should be the same (simpler) as morphing
between meshes.

I did some very simple morphing using Chris Colefax first version of the
mesh macro for my "Z" series
(http://www.mediaport.net/Artichaud/Tran/z/english/gtze.htm).

Gilles Tran

Ken wrote:

> Steven Jones wrote:
> >
> > Does anyone know how to do morphing in POV-Ray?
>
>   Chris Colefax has this on his list of things to do but there is
> nothing available right now, that I am aware of, that can do what
> you ask. You might take a look at the povray.binaries.utilities
> group and look for the extrusion macros posted there about a month
> ago. There were two, one by Gilles Tran, the second (the authors
> name escapes me right now) of the two that offered some form of
> morphing ability. I have not had time to check it out and cannot
> offer any more than that.
>
> --
> Ken Tyler
>
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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Gilles Tran <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote:
: I guess that morphing between meshes with different triangle counts
: shouldn't be impossible.

  Do you have any good idea for this? I'm sure Colefax would like to know
(if he doesn't already).

-- 
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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A "good" idea certainly not... In fact I considered once doing it between
Poser meshes with a small difference in triangle count. I would have made the
morphing with the lowest triangle count and then found a way to make the
remaining triangles (randomly sampled) appear (or disappear), probably by
scaling them up or down, or by changing their transparency, or by affecting
them to another neighbouring triangle in the other mesh.

G.

Nieminen Mika wrote:

> Gilles Tran <tra### [at] inapginrafr> wrote:
> : I guess that morphing between meshes with different triangle counts
> : shouldn't be impossible.
>
>   Do you have any good idea for this? I'm sure Colefax would like to know
> (if he doesn't already).
>
> --
> 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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There was no way that I was going to try and explain that.

GrimDude
vos### [at] arkansasnet

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There are a couple of ways to work around the lack of morphing support.

You can use Chris Colefax's ClockMod to do complex, multi-object
multi-level animations of the various parts of an object, a lot of work
but you can morph between geometric-based objects doing this. The
textures are true morphs in this technique.

Another method is to use the morphing command in Adobe Illustrator,
which is a true morph. Save each frame and convert them to fonts and
then cycle the fonts in POV-Ray. A lot of work, but some pretty complex
morphs can be achieved this way.

Splines can be animated, too. If you can get your artwork into splines,
use Colefax's Spline macro to animate the splines to simulate a morph.

You can fake a morph with image_maps, too. Make your morph in a regular
morphing package and cycle the images by mapping them on an invisible
object in POV.

Let us know what you find out!

steve



Steven Jones wrote:

> Does anyone know how to do morphing in POV-Ray?

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