There are just about as many ways of doing this as there are
people who try, but my choice is to generate all the points at
once using a standalone Java program and then writing them
to a big 3-dimensional array in a file.  I load the file in POV
and use array indices (x=frame, y=location, z=orientation)
to control the placement of points.  I can alter the object at
the point in POV, or do something radical like connecting the
points with cylinders, etc. all in POV.  I also get to do things
with the camera angle and background, but normally I spend
all my time on the algorithm and end up with something lame
like "beans" to illustrate the results :-)

"Paul Vanukoff" <van### [at] primenetcom> wrote in message
news:38860dfd@news.povray.org...
> "Spock" <spo### [at] homecom> wrote in message
news:3885d048@news.povray.org...
> > I told each bean that it loved the origin (linear force) but hated all
> > the other beans (1/distance inverse force).  I gave them all random
> > starting positions and random velocity vectors and started iterating.
> >
> > The result was a 1.3MB animated GIF, too big to post so I put it on
> > my web page (http://members.home.net/spock19) instead. This is the
> > last frame.  Looks like the beans decided to tessellate a sphere...
>
> How is that done? Where you base new values in a frame based on values in
> the previous frame? I can think of a few ways to do it, but what is the
most
> efficient or most widely used?  Nice anim, BTW.
>
>
> --
> Paul Vanukoff
> van### [at] primenetcom
>
>
>

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