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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