David Cuny wrote:
>>>* POV doesn't have a GUI for animation.
> 
>>But the author of the aforementioned app hopes to get that working
>>sometime this year...
> 
> Heh. I wondered when you'd add that to LionSnake and join the dark side! ;-)

I've been scheming it for a while (since 2003 at least).

> AFAIK, the early days of Pixar animation used a POV=SDL sort of approach.
> They have a proprietary interface called 'Marionette.' Characters were
> rigged with 'avars' (articulation variables), and characters were animated
> using a spreadsheet sort of interface. Time (in frames) ran along the 'x'
> axis, and 'avars' on the 'y' axis. To animate a character, you could either
> click in a cell and enter a value, or click a cell and drag the mouse to
> change the cell value.
> 
> A lot's changed since then, although if you check out the 'extras' in "The
> Incredibles" video, you can see that same interface is being used.

Been there, done that, still considering the idea.  My present ambition 
is to have that view and the scene view, and to allow edits in either 
view, with the edit being translated over to the other view.  I hope it 
works.

> There are only a handful of free animation programs that are capable of
> supporting the features that are needed for character animation - bones,
> morphs, and so on. By their nature, most have a pretty steep learning
> curve.

My hope is to have a user interface with one rule:  "When in doubt, 
right-click."  The idea is that a right-click should bring up a context 
menu that covers everything the user can do with the object over which 
the mouse pointer is hovering at the time.  The features can be accessed 
in other ways, true, but the learning curve is simplified if newbies 
have one-stop shopping for their info.

> * LionSnake: Still in development.

And I made a design decision a couple weeks ago that's going to delay 
things.  For some reason I decided that supporting only 3- and 4-sided 
faces was too limiting, so I'm adding support for faces with unlimited 
number of sides[1].  This means:

*  Just about every function that deals with faces has to be rewritten[2];
*  The save format has to be changed [3];
* My surface subdivision macros have to be completely rewritten, because 
the export POV SDL files use the macros [4].

So except for bugfixes to the current version (1.6), there won't be 
anything released in a while.

Regards,
John

[1] Well, okay, the number of sides for a given face is limited to 
32767.  You got a problem with that?

[2] I still have to rewrite the functions to subdivide a portion of the 
mesh; split edges; and to join two vertices together.  The subdivision 
preview is back down to one preview step, and the child faces are flat, 
not smoothed, to the results are still kind of rough.  And of course all 
of the file operations have to be rewritten to support the new features, 
too.

[3] I decided to abandon the save format I developed (since the world 
really did not need a new 3d model format) and have the app use OBJ and 
MTL files for saving and loading geometry and texturing data; the 
animation data will go into a separate file, format to be determined. 
As I write this I am downloading a spec that uses XML :P, but if it's 
too complicated, or if I don't like the way it supports things, I won't 
use it.

[4] This is because the modified Loop scheme I'm presently using doesn't 
support the higher-sided faces.  The Catmull-Clark scheme supports any 
number of sides in a face, so that's what will be forthcoming.

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