In article <3a63a872@news.povray.org>, "David C" <dav### [at] satnet> 
wrote:

>  I have thought about some of these things too. I might have a framerate
> problem if I tried to render the animation in real time. There is no fps
> option in povray as well, so I wouldn't know the user's desired
> framerate. I think definitely that each frame should be rendered and
> written to a file. I'm not sure about real time previewing.

Real time previewing definitely wouldn't be possible...the parse time 
would reduce it to a couple seconds a frame for simple scenes, and I've 
had scenes that went for nearly an hour just parsing. To get an animated 
preview, you would pretty much have to save the frames as they are 
calculated, and then display them. It would be simpler and more 
consistent to treat OpenGL rendering just like ordinary rendering.


> There is also the matter of how to get the frame from opengl to a 
> file. I know some libraries support offscreen rendering, but that 
> again would be platform dependent.

I'm pretty sure there are standard functions for getting the image data 
(glReadPixels()?), and the code for setting up the OpenGL context and 
stuff should be separated out into a platform-dependant section anyway.


> Ah well. Maybe I should play with opengl and get comfortable with it 
> for a few weeks first.

If you need help, I am also learning OpenGL and may be able to help you 
find some resources...

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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