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Hello.
What I'm doing is rendering a high resolution, fairly realistic model of our
solar system.
I've been working with this planetarium modeler that Marius van der Spek
wrote for povray in '98. The modeler itself is very good, with the one
caveat that it's not 100% compatible with povray 3.5, which is unfortunate
because I can't recompile his app as I don't have his source code, just the
.....exe.
The modeler is available on http://objects.povworld.org/
it's called planetarium or similar.
All that aside here's the issue :
I have a program called povplan.exe that I need to call after every frame,
and pass it the new time value as a parametre.
I'm doing this so that I can automatically increment his internal clock and
render an animation of a solar eclipse. Which I'd be more than happy to
share with everyone once I solve this.
So I'm using Pre_Frame_Command.
The doc on this command can be found here.
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/130/
What I have working : I can call the program povplan.exe before each frame
is rendered.
What I don't follow how to do (from the docs on the planetarium) :
"PPTIME.INC returns two sets of variables :
time_string
and
new_yr
new_mo
new_dy
new_hr
new_mi
new_se
where the 'new' variables have the same format of the 'was' variables, and
time_string is a string in a format compatible with the command line
arguments
of the POVPLAN.EXE program.<b> You can invoke POVPLAN.EXE from within your
scene file using POV-Ray's Pre_Frame_Command and the string concatenation
function. See the POV-Ray documentation, SAMPLE.INI and SAMPLE.POV for the
details.</b>
<i>This is the crux of the problem right here. Sample.INI and Sample.pov
don't contain useful info, and the docs don't really explain it either.</i>
Am I actually supposed to include the Pre_Frame_Command in what file? The
Pov? An INI? Right now it's in the master.INI file. Is that part of the
problem?
Once you have called the POVPLAN.EXE program with time_string as the command
line argument, you can create the command line argument for the next frame
by
doing the following :
#declare was_yr = new_yr
#declare was_mo = new_mo
#declare was_dy = new_dy
#declare was_hr = new_hr
#declare was_mi = new_mi
#declare was_se = new_se"
Like I said, I've just never worked with passing files strings, and I don't
know how to go about it exactly.
The docs on string in povray :
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/141/
I'm not expecting much here; perhaps this just requires more knowledge of
the software than I've got, but I'm hoping that someone here has an idea.
It doesn't even have to be a good idea.
Another thing about povray is that the output is always a graphic, so a
debugger or something like cout>> would be so nice, but it's just not
available afaik.
By the by, Happy Thanksgiving.
Thanks
---
too many zigs
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