Are there any keyframe animation libraries available for POV-Ray? How 
easy are they to use?

-- 
--
Michael Horvath
mik### [at] gmailcom
http://isometricland.com

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On 2009-12-22 03:46:28 +0000, SharkD <mik### [at] gmailcom> said:

> Are there any keyframe animation libraries available for POV-Ray? How 
> easy are they to use?
> 
> -- 

Hi,

I would have said have a look at Chris Colefax's POV-Ray Include files 
- particularly the AutoClock macros - but as they were hosted on 
Geocities (which Yahoo! in their wisdom recently shut down) they appear 
to be no longer available online. You can find the pages on the 
Internet Archive (see: 
http://web.archive.org/web/20071226180040/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/)

but the ZIP files appear to have not been archived.

That said, I still have them on my computer or old backup CDs 
somewhere. Which leads me to a follow up question. Chris! Are you 
there? Should I put them back online somewhere?

By the way. Hello everyone! Happy Xmas and all that. :)

Alan.

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"Alan Holding" <soc### [at] informationmonsternet> wrote in message 
news:4b313d60@news.povray.org...
> I would have said have a look at Chris Colefax's POV-Ray Include files - 
> particularly the AutoClock macros - but as they were hosted on Geocities 
> (which Yahoo! in their wisdom recently shut down) they appear to be no 
> longer available online. You can find the pages on the Internet Archive 
> (see: 
>
http://web.archive.org/web/20071226180040/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/)

> but the ZIP files appear to have not been archived.
>
> That said, I still have them on my computer or old backup CDs somewhere. 
> Which leads me to a follow up question. Chris! Are you there? Should I put 
> them back online somewhere?

search this news group for geocities ... there are a couple of threads about 
this very topic!

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Chris Colefax's site can still be found at http://povrayinclude.wytraven.com/.
It's too bad his includes are not out there permanently. Many of his macros were
brilliant and still very useful, especially, besides his clock modifier macros,
his includes for splines and lens effects.

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SharkD wrote:
> Are there any keyframe animation libraries available for POV-Ray? How 
> easy are they to use?
> 
I haven't seen anything that was made strickly for Keyframe animation.
I've been using Keyframe animation with robots. That is using a pose per 
keyframe and leting POV do the inbetween movements.

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Leroy Whetstone <lrw### [at] joplincom> wrote:

> I haven't seen anything that was made strickly for Keyframe animation.
> I've been using Keyframe animation with robots. That is using a pose per
> keyframe and leting POV do the inbetween movements.

For some unfathomable reason, this idea never occurred to me!  :-\

Can you give a simple example of how you go about doing that?  Do you use #if
blocks for the keyframe poses, or what?

Ken

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Leroy Whetstone <lrw### [at] joplincom> wrote:
> SharkD wrote:
> > Are there any keyframe animation libraries available for POV-Ray? How
> > easy are they to use?
> >
> I haven't seen anything that was made strickly for Keyframe animation.
> I've been using Keyframe animation with robots. That is using a pose per
> keyframe and leting POV do the inbetween movements.


Someone ought to develop a standard system for posing of skeletal structures.
Then you could just set things up to move along splines.

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Kenneth wrote:
> For some unfathomable reason, this idea never occurred to me!  :-\
> 
> Can you give a simple example of how you go about doing that?  Do you use #if
> blocks for the keyframe poses, or what?
> 
> Ken
Well, what I use is not simply to set up. But after the set up is done 
then it is relatively easy to use.
  What I do is have a series of Poses in txt files. Then POV uses 
another txt file that has a list of the keyframes & their Poses. Using 
the POV 'frame_number' searches the list and finds two keyframes then 
using the simply formula A+(B-A)*T calculates the pose for a particular 
'frame_number'.
  In formula  A+(B-A)*T
    A= a value(vector or Float) in the first pose
    B= a value(vector or Float) in the second pose
    T= the difference between the first keyframe and the'frame_number'
        divided by the second minus first keyframe
This gives a linear transition between poses.

The main Idea behind all this is that I wanted to be able to reuse the 
poses it different animations. It works great for the short animations I 
was doing. But after I done a few dozen my number of base poses got so 
large it was hard to keep track of them all. So now I keep a pose folder 
for each animation project and make new poses and copy any of base to it.

Hope this helps.
I have the Robots on my Web site it you want to know more.
http://leroywhetstone.s5.com/

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gregjohn wrote:
> Someone ought to develop a standard system for posing of skeletal structures.
> Then you could just set things up to move along splines.

I don't known how we could do that. My robots are basically stick 
figures with around 20 joints not counting the hands and face. When I 
first started play with them I tried to be very flexible by letting the 
length of the bones be set for each character. I can still do it. But 
the poses in keyframe work had to be different for each character. I 
haven't use splines for robots because with I'd need 20 splines to 
control them. That's a lot to do by hand, maybe some software could do it.
   There are more complicated skeletal structures than my robots. Before 
we talk about poses there must be a systematic way of organizing the 
structures of different bone counts and bone lengths. If we had that 
then we have to organize the way those bones can move. I don't see more 
than a handful of people agreeing to any thing.

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Le 2009-12-21 22:46, SharkD a écrit :
> Are there any keyframe animation libraries available for POV-Ray? How
> easy are they to use?
>

What do you exactly mean by "keyframe"?

When a video is made in a numeric format, a keyframe is a single full 
image frame. All others are difference frames that only contain the 
elements of the image that have changed from the previous one. This 
saves a lot on the volume of information.

Thus, a keyframe is generated every time the point of view change 
sudently, like from one scene to the next. There are often a few other 
one every second of few seconds.

At least, that's the meaning I encounter the most frequently.

What the others refers to looks to me more like reference frames or step 
frames.



Alain

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