At work I use a nice little program called Interactive Physics...
simulates motion. It can also output measurements (position, rotation,
etc) to a text file.

Obviously, if I could combine POV and this file, amazing animations
could be made. Is there any easy way to do this? It is a text file for a
falling (and bouncing) square with columns for frame number, xpos, ypos,
and rotation.

Simon
http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet

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On Fri, 21 May 1999 18:05:20 -0300, Simon de Vet wrote:
>At work I use a nice little program called Interactive Physics...
>simulates motion. It can also output measurements (position, rotation,
>etc) to a text file.
>
>Obviously, if I could combine POV and this file, amazing animations
>could be made. Is there any easy way to do this? It is a text file for a
>falling (and bouncing) square with columns for frame number, xpos, ypos,
>and rotation.

First, massage the data file into something the file read stuff in 
POV can understand.  You might need to write some code for this part.

While you're rendering your animation, you can find the frame number
using clock and clock_delta (actually, only if the clock is zero on
the first frame, but you can always add a constant if it's not.)  

Now, just read through the file until you find the right frame number
and use the data in that row.  Parse time might suffer, but you can't
have everything. :)

Alternatively, of course, you could write a Perl script (or some other 
language, I'm just partial to Perl) to convert the data file into a big 
#switch and some supporting code and just #include it, letting the 
compiled C code in the POV parser do what you would have had to do in 
interpreted POV-Script.

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> using clock and clock_delta (actually, only if the clock is zero on

what's clock_delta?

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On Tue, 25 May 1999 00:19:35 +0300, Lewis wrote:
>> using clock and clock_delta (actually, only if the clock is zero on
>
>what's clock_delta?

From the section "Built-in Float Identifiers" in the 3.1 manual:

  The built-in float identifier clock_delta returns the amount 
  of time between clock values in animations in POV-Ray. While 
  most animations only need the clock value itself, some animation 
  calculations are easier if you know how long since the last 
  frame. Caution must be used when designing such scenes. If 
  you render a scene with too few frames, the results may be 
  different than if you render with more frames in a given time 
  period. On non-animated scenes, clock_delta defaults to 1.0. 
  See section "Animation Options" for more details.

This is new in 3.1, as I recall.

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ahhhh. Well, another fault of the help system. The search does not show
it.

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On Tue, 25 May 1999 00:36:57 +0300, Lewis wrote:
>ahhhh. Well, another fault of the help system. The search does not show
>it.

The search doesn't show a large fraction of the identifiers.  For 
example, try finding vaxis_rotate (or any other function.)  This 
is a serious limitation, because the nice new context help feature
depends on being able to find the keyword you had selected.  
Unfortunately, I would imagine that adding such keywords to what
is currently the result of an automatic process would be a lot of
work for our beloved and already-overworked webmaster and Windows 
POV-Team guy.

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>On Tue, 25 May 1999 00:36:57 +0300, Lewis wrote:
>>ahhhh. Well, another fault of the help system. The search does not
show
>>it.
>
>The search doesn't show a large fraction of the identifiers.  For
>example, try finding vaxis_rotate (or any other function.)  This
>is a serious limitation, because the nice new context help feature
>depends on being able to find the keyword you had selected.
>Unfortunately, I would imagine that adding such keywords to what
>is currently the result of an automatic process would be a lot of
>work for our beloved and already-overworked webmaster and Windows
>POV-Team guy.
>

        Em, guys,

        I had no problem finding either of those words using the
"search" function of the help system. Frankly, I rarely use the index
: I find that even the summary is more helpful now that I know POV
somewhat better.

        Jean

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