It sounds like for modeling and movement the hard part is already done.  For
your purposes it seems like it'd be a waste to re-do it all in Pov-Ray.  You
don't have to do each frame separately though.  You can export the meshes
for the individual bones, and then put the position information in separate
numbered files, which are called from a large #switch statement, (or just
put the data directly into the #switch statement.)  Use clock or
frame_number to select the right data for that frame.  Anyway, yeah I'd go
ahead and do the frame-by-frame method, but with a little automation.
Charles

"octogonalMonk" <fucrate ::at:: gmail ::dot:: com> wrote:
> To preface, I am a complete newb when it comes to any sort of ray-tracing or
> animation applications.  That said my boss has assigned me the job of taking
> a real-time animated scene currently coded to render in OpenGL and somehow
> ram it through a free ray-tracing application until it looks pretty.  The
> animated scene uses a skeleton model modeled in maya or something and it
> has walking and arm-moving animations while it walks around the scene and
> the camera moves around watching him.  I know it would be possible to run
> the OpenGL application and export the scene every frame, then loading that
> scene into POV-Ray, render it and save each frame to a TGA and then compile
> them together to make a movie.  I want to know if there is a more integrated
> way to do this, such as using the clock function to animate the skeleton
> model and translate him around the scene and actually do it all from within
> POV-Ray.  Has this kind of stuff been done? I haven't seen many animated
> models in the example animations around the web.  Is it even possible?  Any
> help is really appreciated as my job is on the line.
>
> cheers
> -oct

Post a reply to this message