Greetings !

    Yesterday I replied to another POV-Ray user on how to
use the animation feature in POV-Ray 3.0x. I went into
enough detail for this person that I thought it might make
a good mini-tutorial on the subject for new users or users
that haven't gotten their feet wet, yet, with animations.

So here with a couple of modifications is the body of text
I sent the other user.

Lets create an object to animate:

camera{location<0,0,-4>look_at 0}
light_source{<0,0,-50>rgb 1}

sphere{<0,0,0>,1 pigment{gradient x
color_map{[0 rgb<1,0,0>][1 rgb 1]}}
finish{ambient .4 diffuse .1 reflection .1 specular 1 roughness .001}
rotate 360*y*clock}

    The above won't do anything during a single frame render.

    First let me explain a couple things. To produce an animation
you will need to produce several images, just like cartoon
animators do. Secondly you will need a program, external to
POV-Ray to compile the multiple images produced into an
animation. A great little command line animation program called
DTA or Dave's targa animator does a great job. If you don't have
it and can't find it post a message to the povray animation news
group and somebody will tell you where to get a copy. It produces
.fli .flc and a couple other animation types. There are other programs
you can use but I think DTA is a good one to start with.

    Now for the specifics of making the frames you need.
The following describes how to rotate your sphere once
in a 360 degree circle. You could change rotate 360*y*clock
to 720*y*clock to make it rotate twice or any other multiple
of 360 you choose to use.

    On your menu bar find the tools section and click on
edit master povray.ini. Add the following lines anywhere
in the ini file, save and exit.

;Initial_Frame = 1
;Final_Frame   = 100
;Subset_Start_Frame = 50
;Subset_End_Frame = 100
;Cyclic_Animation = on

To use these settings you need to un-comment the functions you
want to use by removing the ";".

To produce a simple continuous animation start with these settings:

  Initial_Frame      = 1
  Final_Frame       = 10
 Cyclic_Animation = on

    This will produce a 10 frame animation.

    The initial frame tells Pov you want to start with frame #1

    The final frame tells Pov how many frames (images) you want
to produce. The more you specify the smoother the animation
but the larger the animation file size. You will later learn how
to balance the # vs. file size as you gain experiance.

    The use cyclic animation tells Pov you want it to produce
an animation that will loop continuously. If your animation
had an object moving in a straight line this would be of no use
to you. Since we are looking at an object that is going to turn
360 degrees on it's axis this is a perfect example of when to use
it.

    The other two settings can be used to render only a
portion of the frames that make up an animation. Say
you wanted only to look at the end of your scene,
before rendering 1000 frames, to make sure everything
ends up where it is supposed to. This will allow you to
to so. It's not normally needed however.

    There are many other examples in the docs and I
strongly recommend you read the section on using
the clock values in your scenes and the section 4
tutorial on animation.

    Don't forget to re-comment the animation lines in the
master povray.ini when you are not doing animation
or else the next non animation scene you try to run
will run the exact same image for however many frames
you have specified in the final frames section.

    Need more help ?

    Let me know.

    K.Tyler

I can be reached at: tyl### [at] pacbellnet

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