There's an aspect of the animplugin that I'm finding can be annoying at
times. This is the fact that it uses the current status in Moray to create
the animations. While this may have many advantages, it can be frustrating
when you happen to click on something, changing it accidentally within Moray
while the animation is being generated. This causes the animplugin to access
the latest state that it finds Moray to be in and uses that to continue with
the animation run.

Xander, my question is this: could you have the plugin write the animation
parameters to a file, and use that file to generate the animation? This
might help in at least two ways: (remember, I'm not a programmer, so I'm not
really aware of all the ramifications here... I'm merely coming from a
user's perspective on this...) It might, #1, keep changes from occurring
accidentally after the animator has spent hours perfecting and refining all
the various aspects of his work, and, #2, it might allow the generation to
happen in the background in another process, freeing Moray itself up to
allow work to continue on the next scene or project.

One really annoying thing that kinda goes along with this is the fact that
the animplugin doesn't change the type of motion of a newly selected entity
to its own setting or to a default setting. For example: say I've been
setting the keyframes of a camera using cubic interpolation and when I'm
finished, I go to select a light to change a previously set keyframe's
parameters. This light's motion was set to linear. When I first select it,
however, the animplugin's setting stays at cubic. Thus if I don't first jump
to another keyframe, the setting will stay on cubic (of course I won't
notice this...) and when I alter that keyframe, voila! the whole path for
the light moves over to cubic. Frustration...

This little gotcha combined with the previous one has caused many hours of
lost tracing. However, this "bug" may also be a feature. Remember April's
discussion in another thread as copied below?

April wrote:
>
>   is there a way to change the type of movement (i.e. step, linear, cubic)
> between frames (i.e. step from 0:0 to 0:1, linear from 0:1 to 0:2 etc,)
or to
> change the type of movement for different objects?

<Xander's reply>Currently, the spline type is the same over the entire
animation.
Individual pieces of an object (in group or CSG) can use different types
of splines (step, linear, cubic).  Separate objects can also use
different types of splines.

If you want the type of motion to be different, you can always break up
your animation into separate scenes.  This isn't all that different from
typical production - you rarely have more than a second or two of an
animation in one scene.  Of course, I need to beef up the
cut/paste/merge capabilities to make life easier when you do that.
-----

Well, you *might* be able to change the path type if you change it in Moray
while the animplug is doing its thing. You'll have to be on your toes,
however, and get the changes in during the proper frame... :-) Haven't tried
this myself, but who knows?

-Kelly
(kla### [at] usacom)

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"K. Lasse" wrote:
> 
> There's an aspect of the animplugin that I'm finding can be annoying at
> times. This is the fact that it uses the current status in Moray to create
> the animations. While this may have many advantages, it can be frustrating
> when you happen to click on something, changing it accidentally within Moray
> while the animation is being generated. This causes the animplugin to access
> the latest state that it finds Moray to be in and uses that to continue with
> the animation run.

do you mean you accidentally changed things?  or you just selected
things.  i was selecting things all over the place to see what the
current settings for the frame were and never had problems.  however, i
was very careful not to change and transformations (everything was
frozen).

Remember April's
> discussion in another thread as copied below?

that was me, but from my mom's house.

we must remember that officially, this plugin is still in beta.  a lot
of fixes and upgrades are in the works.  from what i understand, xander
has a bit of input in moray's development and is working with lutz to
make animation better.

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ryan constantine <rco### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message
news:396CDC59.EECF3109@yahoo.com...
>
> do you mean you accidentally changed things?  or you just selected
> things.  i was selecting things all over the place to see what the
> current settings for the frame were and never had problems.  however, i
> was very careful not to change and transformations (everything was
> frozen).

Yeah, it was definitely by accident... I was doing the same thing, clicking
around to verify certain settings etc... completely my bad - I've stopped
doing that. I'm only suggesting some way to help keep clods like me from
messing with things once the step is taken to begin the run. Something like
a final fixed state... a read-only file on the harddisk... I don't know... ?

>
> Remember April's
> > discussion in another thread as copied below?
>
> that was me, but from my mom's house.
>

Yeah, I remember now, sorry...

> we must remember that officially, this plugin is still in beta.  a lot
> of fixes and upgrades are in the works.  from what i understand, xander
> has a bit of input in moray's development and is working with lutz to
> make animation better.

I realize that things are still new and that this is only an "on-the-side"
project for Xander, so I only suggest these things as future possibilities.
I'm trying to communicate with the author as a user. Certainly no criticism
is meant - only (hopefully) positive suggestions.

-Kelly
(kla### [at] usacom)

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"K. Lasse" wrote:
> 
> There's an aspect of the animplugin that I'm finding can be annoying at
> times. This is the fact that it uses the current status in Moray to create
> the animations. While this may have many advantages, it can be frustrating
> when you happen to click on something, changing it accidentally within Moray
> while the animation is being generated. This causes the animplugin to access
> the latest state that it finds Moray to be in and uses that to continue with
> the animation run.

Yup - that's a problem when rendering an animation with POV-Ray.  If you
are using the built in renderer, that shouldn't happen.

I don't really have much choice in the matter - in order to use POV-Ray
to render, I need to have Moray export the scene (which triggers the
export of other plugin information as well).  That means that I need to
step from frame to frame, exporting and rendering.

One approach is to lock down editing during the rendering of an
animation.  Lutz could probably provide a function to do that by adding
"if ()" statements in hundreds of places in Moray.  Another approach
would be to essentially spawn a separate version of Moray with the .mdl
file as of the point that rendering was invoked, then use the separate
version (which would be hidden) to do the animation.

No matter what, this is a problem that will take quite a bit of coding
on both sides of the plugin interface.

> One really annoying thing that kinda goes along with this is the fact that
> the animplugin doesn't change the type of motion of a newly selected entity
> to its own setting...

Oh, that's a bug.  I'll add to the list.

Xander

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i just wanted to thank xander and lutz for their work on the animation
plugin.  with recent developments (including top secret new features in
v3.3) moray is becoming more exciting to work with and more of a
complete modelling solution.  keep up the good work guys.

Alexander Enzmann wrote:
> 
> "K. Lasse" wrote:
> >
> > There's an aspect of the animplugin that I'm finding can be annoying at
> > times. This is the fact that it uses the current status in Moray to create
> > the animations. While this may have many advantages, it can be frustrating
> > when you happen to click on something, changing it accidentally within Moray
> > while the animation is being generated. This causes the animplugin to access
> > the latest state that it finds Moray to be in and uses that to continue with
> > the animation run.
> 
> Yup - that's a problem when rendering an animation with POV-Ray.  If you
> are using the built in renderer, that shouldn't happen.
> 
> I don't really have much choice in the matter - in order to use POV-Ray
> to render, I need to have Moray export the scene (which triggers the
> export of other plugin information as well).  That means that I need to
> step from frame to frame, exporting and rendering.
> 
> One approach is to lock down editing during the rendering of an
> animation.  Lutz could probably provide a function to do that by adding
> "if ()" statements in hundreds of places in Moray.  Another approach
> would be to essentially spawn a separate version of Moray with the .mdl
> file as of the point that rendering was invoked, then use the separate
> version (which would be hidden) to do the animation.
> 
> No matter what, this is a problem that will take quite a bit of coding
> on both sides of the plugin interface.
> 
> > One really annoying thing that kinda goes along with this is the fact that
> > the animplugin doesn't change the type of motion of a newly selected entity
> > to its own setting...
> 
> Oh, that's a bug.  I'll add to the list.
> 
> Xander

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> Yup - that's a problem when rendering an animation with POV-Ray.  If you
> are using the built in renderer, that shouldn't happen.
>
> I don't really have much choice in the matter - in order to use POV-Ray
> to render, I need to have Moray export the scene (which triggers the
> export of other plugin information as well).  That means that I need to
> step from frame to frame, exporting and rendering.

why not step through the scene, and export all frames as seperate numbered
pov files, it would then be only a small task to create a batch renderer,
the renders each pov scene and either dumps a ton of tga files some where or
complies them to an avi

it there no way in regular pov code to say render 001.pov, 002.pov and so
on?

Rick

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"Rick [Kitty5]" wrote:
> 
> > Yup - that's a problem when rendering an animation with POV-Ray.  If you
> > are using the built in renderer, that shouldn't happen.
> >
> > I don't really have much choice in the matter - in order to use POV-Ray
> > to render, I need to have Moray export the scene (which triggers the
> > export of other plugin information as well).  That means that I need to
> > step from frame to frame, exporting and rendering.
> 
> why not step through the scene, and export all frames as seperate numbered
> pov files, it would then be only a small task to create a batch renderer,
> the renders each pov scene and either dumps a ton of tga files some where or
> complies them to an avi

It gets really complicated to do that in the face of .inc files, etc. 
If everything were written to a single .pov file, this approach would be
pretty easy.  This has come up before and after spending time looking at
it, it just seemed to be more effort (if not downright impossible for
big/complicated scenes) than it was worth.

Xander

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