"Rune" <run### [at] runevisioncom> wrote:

> If you only need toons, you might do fine, but for
> serious work it won't do.
>


I take offense at the implied dichotomy between "toon" and "serious". (Not
personal, but intellectual or ideological offense).  "The Incredibles",
Pixar's next film, I predict, will earn GOBS of cash (a professional
achievement) and will represent a technical achievement on the par  of
Jar-Jar Binks or Gollum.


> Despite that I've come to the conclusion that doing character
> animation *completely* within POV-Ray *is* a waste of time. That is, if
> you're not satisfied with blobby toons, unsmooth joints etc.
>


I guess my view is that going from a serious modeller to povray is a waste
of time.  It's just another tracer.  The coolness of povray (perhaps a
rarely held opinion) is in its being freeware and allowing the script-based
generation of objects. If I were to get another program to make the
objects, it would seem to make sense to have that program take the
pictures, too.

That being said, I think it would be a great boon if someone were to make a
bending bicubic patch animatable within povray.

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>  The coolness of povray (perhaps a
> rarely held opinion) is in its being freeware and allowing the
script-based
> generation of objects.

The script based generation is nice, but from my viewpoint, nothing I have
ever seen or used beats POV-Ray for control over light.  Many times, I've
placed point sources only .001 POV unit away from an obstruction to get the
light exactly where I wanted it to come from.  Interior lighting with Poser
has been nothing but frustration, I'll normally export the scene without
lights and do the lighting in POV.  Clumsy, inefficient, but exactly what
I'm seeing in my head.  Pretty hard to beat.

Greybeard

(Who isn't going to spend a kilobuck to get what POV allows me to do.)

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Rune wrote:

> I've been very much a POV purist. My animation attempts with AL the Alien
> proves that. Despite that I've come to the conclusion that doing character
> animation *completely* within POV-Ray *is* a waste of time. That is, if
> you're not satisfied with blobby toons, unsmooth joints etc.

Organic shapes of any kind are far, far, easier to do with a modeler
than with hand-written SDL.

Case in point:  The green aliens in my April 2004 entry would have taken
weeks to create using hand-edited SDL code.  Using the modeler I've
developed, I generated the model in only a couple hours.  This enabled
me to move on to other portions of the work.

It's true that the aliens ride floating carts which are done in SDL,
but SDL *is* good for some things.

SDL can procedurally generate a small subset of organic shapes, such as
trees.  The petrified trees that appear in most of my Rusty animations
were generated this way, but I *never* let the camera get close enough
to reveal how little detail they have; the limbs and trunks are eight-
sided prisms, with smoothed normals, and there are only three different
trees (each being copied many hundreds of times).

It's also true that all the time Greg has spent trying to get a decent
human from SDL has probably resulted in development of some useful
scripting techniques.  Whether this is worth the immense amound of time
invested is another matter.

I'm reminded of some of Howard Day's stuff.  Instead of doing procedural
textures, he simply rendered an silhouette of the model, used a paint
program on the resulting image, and then made the image into an
image_map and applied it to the model.  He'd probably still be getting
some of the textures right if he'd stuck with SDL, but instead he was
able to devote more time to the ticky parts of the work.

Regards,
John

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gregjohn wrote:

> "Rune" <run### [at] runevisioncom> wrote:
> 
>>If you only need toons, you might do fine, but for
>>serious work it won't do.
> 
> I take offense at the implied dichotomy between "toon" and "serious". (Not
> personal, but intellectual or ideological offense).  "The Incredibles",
> Pixar's next film, I predict, will earn GOBS of cash (a professional
> achievement) and will represent a technical achievement on the par  of
> Jar-Jar Binks or Gollum.

One issue that is important is the ability to get the *exact* effect you
want with the minimal expenditure of time.  SDL can do everything, but
the investment of lifespan is too long for some effects.

>>Despite that I've come to the conclusion that doing character
>>animation *completely* within POV-Ray *is* a waste of time. That is, if
>>you're not satisfied with blobby toons, unsmooth joints etc.
> 
> I guess my view is that going from a serious modeller to povray is a waste
> of time.  It's just another tracer.  The coolness of povray (perhaps a
> rarely held opinion) is in its being freeware and allowing the script-based
> generation of objects.

Another beneift of POV-Ray is that I can use the SDL to make alignments
of objects far more precisely than any modeler can allow for the same
amount of lifespan invested.

Regards,
John

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> I'm not sure I have the required skills, but I'd like to write a program in
> Java that can import a boned mesh in some format, move the bones around,
> deform the mesh according to the moved bones and then export the mesh as a
> mesh2 for example.
> 
> Are there any widely used formats for boned meshes?
> 
> It should contain the mesh (typically a character in some standard pose),
> the bones in the same standard pose, and data about which vertices are
> affected by which bones.
> 
> However, in order to deform the mesh correctly, I'd probably also have to
> know the algorithm used for the deforming. Even with that available I might
> not have the skills, but I can always hope.
> 
> I think I have to base it all on a pre-existing format for boned meshes,
> because how else would people be able to actually create those boned meshes?
> I certainly don't have the skills to create a graphical mesh and boning
> modeler/editor.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Rune
You may have a look at this
http://projects.blender.org/projects/makeh

I havn't look further whet it is exactly but I thought it might be usefull.

--
Clipper

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"GreyBeard" <r.b### [at] sbcglobalnet> wrote in message
news:4132b2a2$1@news.povray.org...
>
> The script based generation is nice, but from my viewpoint, nothing I have
> ever seen or used beats POV-Ray for control over light.  Many times, I've
> placed point sources only .001 POV unit away
>


I'm sure my computer lingese is lacking. I guess this is in a way a benefit
of "scripting."

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"John VanSickle" <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
news:4132b83d$1@news.povray.org...
> Case in point:  The green aliens in my April 2004 entry would have taken
> weeks to create using hand-edited SDL code.  Using the modeler I've
> developed, I generated the model in only a couple hours.  This enabled
> me to move on to other portions of the work.
>


Questions:
1) Are they also part of the lion snake modelling system?  I was about to
download and try it out once, but the weekend I had free to do it was when
your ISP was refusing attempts.

2) One thing I've always been wanting to ask about your system.   I'm
assuming you're talking about the aliens which got bit by the tomatoes.  Has
your system therefore reached the "pants" level of acheivement-- to use my
earlier terminology-- where the "body" is like the hip/but" of a pair of
pants, and the two eyestalks are the "legs"?   If so, is this part of
something you have released-- lionsnake??

Thanks.

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Greg M. Johnson wrote:

> "John VanSickle" <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
> news:4132b83d$1@news.povray.org...
> 
>>Case in point:  The green aliens in my April 2004 entry would have taken
>>weeks to create using hand-edited SDL code.  Using the modeler I've
>>developed, I generated the model in only a couple hours.  This enabled
>>me to move on to other portions of the work.
> 
> Questions:
> 1) Are they also part of the lion snake modelling system?  I was about to
> download and try it out once, but the weekend I had free to do it was when
> your ISP was refusing attempts.

Yes.  I moved the download to a new site (the old page will link to it).

> 2) One thing I've always been wanting to ask about your system.   I'm
> assuming you're talking about the aliens which got bit by the tomatoes.  Has
> your system therefore reached the "pants" level of acheivement-- to use my
> earlier terminology-- where the "body" is like the hip/but" of a pair of
> pants, and the two eyestalks are the "legs"?   If so, is this part of
> something you have released-- lionsnake??

Yes.  The eyestalks are chains of three or four bones each.  At the end
of each stalk there is a two-bone fork, to support both the upper and
lower lid of each eye.

The mouth is done with eight bones, one for each corner of the mouth and
three for each lip.

The modeler applies only the most basic limits to the bones, namely that
bones can share start points, but not end points, and that the end point
of any bone can be the starting point for as many bones as your memory
will allow.  I'm working on a model of a creature with six legs and two
arms (I forget whether I gave it a tail).  I still haven't modeled the
bone support for the mouth or the eyelids (or the mesh to serve as the
skin).

The actual reason I started working on the modeler was that after seeing
some of the initial concept art for the IMP I concluded that a real
modeler was essential for some of the work planned.  This was shortly
after the IMP was launched, and to be honest I haven't paid much
attention to the IMP since then.

Regards,
John

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"Rune" <run### [at] runevisioncom> wrote:
> I'm not sure I have the required skills, but I'd like to write a program in
> Java that can import a boned mesh in some format, move the bones around,
> deform the mesh according to the moved bones and then export the mesh as a
> mesh2 for example.
>
> Are there any widely used formats for boned meshes?
>
> It should contain the mesh (typically a character in some standard pose),
> the bones in the same standard pose, and data about which vertices are
> affected by which bones.
>
> However, in order to deform the mesh correctly, I'd probably also have to
> know the algorithm used for the deforming. Even with that available I might
> not have the skills, but I can always hope.
>
> I think I have to base it all on a pre-existing format for boned meshes,
> because how else would people be able to actually create those boned meshes?
> I certainly don't have the skills to create a graphical mesh and boning
> modeler/editor.

I was going to point you to the h-anim work that has been done for VRML, but
a lot of that seems to have disappeared off the web3d site. The people who
did the h-anim work have kept some of it up and available at
http://www.hanim.org
It might help, but will probably leave you more puzzled than anything.
H-anim and VRML are open formats.

A better place is a young guy's site here in Australia. He calls himself
Thyme and is very friendly and helpful. He makes his program Seamless3d
available free from his website at
http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/gperrett/seamless3d/index.html
It does animation of single-mesh avatars by moving the points in the mesh as
you were saying. He really is the best person you could talk to on this.
His work is all in VRML, but really that is similar in many ways to
POV-Ray; just that VRML is real-time and POV-Ray is raytraced and geared
more to complex, beautiful images.

If you want to see some of the examples they used to have on the h-anim site
and the web3d site email me back and I'll send them to you. Luckily I saved
them to my hard drive a while ago.

Best wishes,

- miriam (at) werple . net . au

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I should have mentioned that conversion between VRML and POV-Ray is easy.
They are both ASCII 3d scripting languages with some similarities, and
there are a number of tools that will convert automatically (pov2vrml,
AccuTrans, etc).

VRML continuous mesh avatars can use java to manipulate the mesh vertices or
VRML's own scripting to do it. I have examples of both. At the very least
this would help you work out a way to get POV-Ray to do it.

I have been using VRML for several years and have become a little unhappy
with the development effort there in recent years. I've always thought
POV-Ray had one of the coolest communities and has a very economical
language. It always seemed to me that being able to model and move things
in POV-Ray in realtime would make a lot of sense, so that when you are
happy with the layout of the scene you could render that as the raytraced
final image. It surprises me that this never happened. When I was manager
of a 3d multiuser world for kids a little while back I had the wonderful
experience of watching kids as young as 5 years old building things by
moving them around inside the virtual world. It is a very powerful way of
doing things. Imagine if we could do that with POV-Ray!

(Sorry, that last bit is a little bit off-topic.)

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