I've taken some time, done some research, and download way too many files
over the past few days.  The bigest change so far is the system I use for
animating meshes.  My evaluation copy of milkshape expired, and I couldn't
reinstall and make it work, and so I had to search out another application
for creating animations.  I found two candidates: Blender3d and Art of
Illusion (AOI).

Blender it turns out has a very powerful and intuitive animation system...
Unfortunatly the rest of the interface goes out of its way to hide from the
user, and I have to go through a large number of steps to get content into
or out of Blender.

Art of Illusion is fairly new (one strike), and is writen in Java (two
strikes).  Luckily it is not terribly difficult to use, and has direct
Povray 3.5 export!  The animation system is functional (it even has some
neat features), but it doesn't feel fully finished.  It is difficult to
setup you bones correctly, and it is hard to control how the bones move.
Despite this though AOI seems to be my best option for the time being.

Anyway about the animation, the other night I was watching a movie, and in
one part their were glowing worms.  Like any good Povrayer I looked at them,
and said to myself "I can make those!"  And so I did.  The worm has media in
it, and has a media glow around it.  The animation has six keyframes, but no
interpolation as The only macro I have seen for mesh interpolation is only
good for mesh... not mesh2.

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Download 'glow_worm.avi.dat' (19 KB)