hey ken,

i do believe i just sent a personal email to you when i meant to post
to this group.  sorry bout that!  the gist of it:

nothing against dave's targa animator, but if you want to work with a
window's app, fast movie processor will crunch your sequenced
bitmaps into an AVI and it is very very user friendly (even i had no
problem using it).  it is freeware.

the only problem i had was with some pretty bad artifacting, which
was solved by changing the codec bit rate to 1200.

good luck, miker

K. Tyler <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote in message
news:35E9F920.E4CD24B8@pacbell.net...
> BoDonna wrote:
>
> >   thank you for  the animation tutorial Ken !
> >                 I was wondering if you or someone else could go one step
> > further and do a mini-tutorial on Dave's Targa Animator. It seems this
> > programs runs in DOS(Dark Ominous Space ) and does not make sense to me
> > after reading the Read Me file.
> >                Maybe a step-by-step of the above scene would be cool.
> >                Is there a WIN95 program that inputs/outputs the same
files
> > as DTA or if not, maybe some skilled programmer could design one. If
Taps
> > could do it for a Height-field generator why can't they make something
for
> > Animation??
> >
> >                                     thanks for listening
> >                                           GAR
>
>   I think I can offer you something a little better that my command
> line options
>
> for DTA.
>
>     Take a look in the POV-Ray docs under section 3 which
> describes the use of .ini files with POV-Ray. Then in one of
> your POV-Ray subdirectories you find an .ini file called tgafli.ini.
> This was written by those incredible members of the pov team
> that seem to somehow think of everything. When activated this
> .ini file will allow you to render however many frames you specified
> in the final frames section, then it will automatically call DTA,
> compile your animation for you using DTA. You can edit this file
> to change the final animation size, resolution, and type. Using the
> format of this .ini file you can use it as a foot print to call other
> animation packages to compile your rendered frames.
>
>     You asked about other animation packages and there are
> several available. One I'm falling in love with is a shareware
> package called Main Actor.
> I think the URL for this is http://www.mainconcept.de but if
> it doesn't work I'm not responsible. It's 100 degrees F here today
> and my brain hurts.
> Another favorite of many people is called Video For DOS of VFD.
> It is of course another dos based program.
>
>     If you absolutely must have some DTA parameters to pass to
> the DTA program here are some that should work but mind you
> I'm doing this from memory and as such might fail miserably.
>
>     Let's assume you have named you animation test.pov. You
> have told POV-Ray to render 10 frames for this animation.
> You wait until POV-Ray has finished rendering these ten frames.
>
>     Somewhere on your drive you now have ten .tga files.
> They will be listed as test001.tga, test002.tga, test003.tga ... etc.
> Pov automatically adds the extra three digits for you as it renders
> each one.
>     Copy or move them to where you have DTA installed if it is
> different from where the tga files are located.
>
> Go to that directory and type the following at a dos prompt:
>
> dta test*. /otest
>
> This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory called test
> and to produce an animation called test.fli
>
> dta test*. /a1 /otest
>
> This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory starting with test,
> take the average between 1 frames (read the dta docs for more info)
> and then produce an animation called test.fli. Average is a nice option
> for creating motion blur : )
>
> dta test*. /x2 /otest
>
> Same as above but instead expands each frame by looking at
> the objects position in the image and the position in the frames
> before and after the frame it's working on (again the dta docs
> can explain it better than I can).
>     Your original 10 frames are now expanded to 20 (30 ?) frames.
> This function can help smooth out the gaps between images in
> your animation. This also can be a powerful feature. Use this
> when doing test renderings for your animations. Ten frames
> is usually considered too low a number to get a good animation.
> But if you just want a quick preview, render ten quick frames,
> use the expand command and it will do a good job of showing
> you what your animation would look like if you rendered many
> more frames.
>
>
> dta test*. /s200  /otest
>
> This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory called test
> and slow down the playback of your animation to a speed of
> 200 milliseconds ? per frame (I'm not sure how this is implemented
> but it works).
> You will find on many of the shorter animations that you try to
> produce they seem to play back way to fast to be useful. Use this
> command to slow your animation down. A range of /s50 to /s300
> is a good place to start until you understand the option.
>
> Well that about sucks me dry for information on animations and using
> DTA. If I seem to have missed something let me know and I'll see
> if I can fill in the blanks.
>
> Happy raytracing and enjoy your new found skills.
>
> K.Tyler
>

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