Tom Stone wrote:

> In article <3bcdd1c3@news.povray.org>, "Vampyrium" <cyb### [at] hotmailcom>
> wrote:
>
> >POV claims to do field rendering but
> >it doesnt really, ths feature is absolutely useless, i dont know why it is
> >even there, it should either be removed or fixed.
>
> I don't know enough to have an opinion. Can anyone else confirm or refute?

OK. I just checked into it.

Here's where it comes out not so handy.

Say I have an animation. I set it up carefully. I go to render it. Say I
render 640x480, 300 frames. I take the 30 output frames and make an MPEG or
divx or whatever out of it. Of course, I set it to be 30 fps. I get a nice,
ten second animation that plays well on my computer.

Now I decide that since I have access to a nice, single-frame recorder video
deck (SVHS, not Digital Beta - I'm not that right), I'd like to put it on
video to show my friends. Oooh, lookit dat! POV-Ray does field rendering!!! So
I got and add "+UF" and re-render my animation.

Hmmm... Strange, it's not interleaved. OK, I R_FM. Ahhh, every two output
files need to be combined. So I go and get something setup to combine those
two images for output. Whew. Lot's of file munging later it's ready. I go and
dump it to video, using my single-frame recorder.

Oh no! My beautiful animation is now only 5 seconds long, and it's speeded
up!! Woe! Dismay! Gnashing of Teeth!!!!


Well, OK. It's not the end of the world, but it is annoying. Using the 'field
rendering' switch effectively changes POV-Ray from outputting frames to
outputting fields. So in one sense it is technically accurate as to being a
"field rendering" option. On the other hand, other 3D packages will still
output the same number of files, but then go on to put two fields per file. So
POV-Ray is different from those.

Of course, it might be hard to make POV-Ray do two rendering passes per one
output file, so there may be technical limitations to getting it changed.

Then again, there's that lingering problem of the clock values being off.
Sigh. No easy fix here.

BTW, it's quite amusing that the preview mode under Unix/Linux happens to
collect up the fields and make you think it's doing the right thing :-)   [see
my posting of one under p.b-t.b]


--
Jon A. Cruz
http://www.geocities.com/joncruz/action.html

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