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Greetings !
Yesterday I replied to another POV-Ray user on how to
use the animation feature in POV-Ray 3.0x. I went into
enough detail for this person that I thought it might make
a good mini-tutorial on the subject for new users or users
that haven't gotten their feet wet, yet, with animations.
So here with a couple of modifications is the body of text
I sent the other user.
Lets create an object to animate:
camera{location<0,0,-4>look_at 0}
light_source{<0,0,-50>rgb 1}
sphere{<0,0,0>,1 pigment{gradient x
color_map{[0 rgb<1,0,0>][1 rgb 1]}}
finish{ambient .4 diffuse .1 reflection .1 specular 1 roughness .001}
rotate 360*y*clock}
The above won't do anything during a single frame render.
First let me explain a couple things. To produce an animation
you will need to produce several images, just like cartoon
animators do. Secondly you will need a program, external to
POV-Ray to compile the multiple images produced into an
animation. A great little command line animation program called
DTA or Dave's targa animator does a great job. If you don't have
it and can't find it post a message to the povray animation news
group and somebody will tell you where to get a copy. It produces
.fli .flc and a couple other animation types. There are other programs
you can use but I think DTA is a good one to start with.
Now for the specifics of making the frames you need.
The following describes how to rotate your sphere once
in a 360 degree circle. You could change rotate 360*y*clock
to 720*y*clock to make it rotate twice or any other multiple
of 360 you choose to use.
On your menu bar find the tools section and click on
edit master povray.ini. Add the following lines anywhere
in the ini file, save and exit.
;Initial_Frame = 1
;Final_Frame = 100
;Subset_Start_Frame = 50
;Subset_End_Frame = 100
;Cyclic_Animation = on
To use these settings you need to un-comment the functions you
want to use by removing the ";".
To produce a simple continuous animation start with these settings:
Initial_Frame = 1
Final_Frame = 10
Cyclic_Animation = on
This will produce a 10 frame animation.
The initial frame tells Pov you want to start with frame #1
The final frame tells Pov how many frames (images) you want
to produce. The more you specify the smoother the animation
but the larger the animation file size. You will later learn how
to balance the # vs. file size as you gain experiance.
The use cyclic animation tells Pov you want it to produce
an animation that will loop continuously. If your animation
had an object moving in a straight line this would be of no use
to you. Since we are looking at an object that is going to turn
360 degrees on it's axis this is a perfect example of when to use
it.
The other two settings can be used to render only a
portion of the frames that make up an animation. Say
you wanted only to look at the end of your scene,
before rendering 1000 frames, to make sure everything
ends up where it is supposed to. This will allow you to
to so. It's not normally needed however.
There are many other examples in the docs and I
strongly recommend you read the section on using
the clock values in your scenes and the section 4
tutorial on animation.
Don't forget to re-comment the animation lines in the
master povray.ini when you are not doing animation
or else the next non animation scene you try to run
will run the exact same image for however many frames
you have specified in the final frames section.
Need more help ?
Let me know.
K.Tyler
I can be reached at: tyl### [at] pacbell net
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K. Tyler wrote:
> Greetings !
>
> Yesterday I replied to another POV-Ray user on how to
> use the animation feature in POV-Ray 3.0x. I went into
> enough detail for this person that I thought it might make
> a good mini-tutorial on the subject for new users or users
> that haven't gotten their feet wet, yet, with animations.
>
> So here with a couple of modifications is the body of text
> I sent the other user.
>
> Lets create an object to animate:
>
> camera{location<0,0,-4>look_at 0}
> light_source{<0,0,-50>rgb 1}
>
> sphere{<0,0,0>,1 pigment{gradient x
> color_map{[0 rgb<1,0,0>][1 rgb 1]}}
> finish{ambient .4 diffuse .1 reflection .1 specular 1 roughness .001}
> rotate 360*y*clock}
>
> The above won't do anything during a single frame render.
>
> First let me explain a couple things. To produce an animation
> you will need to produce several images, just like cartoon
> animators do. Secondly you will need a program, external to
> POV-Ray to compile the multiple images produced into an
> animation. A great little command line animation program called
> DTA or Dave's targa animator does a great job. If you don't have
> it and can't find it post a message to the povray animation news
> group and somebody will tell you where to get a copy. It produces
> .fli .flc and a couple other animation types. There are other programs
> you can use but I think DTA is a good one to start with.
>
> Now for the specifics of making the frames you need.
> The following describes how to rotate your sphere once
> in a 360 degree circle. You could change rotate 360*y*clock
> to 720*y*clock to make it rotate twice or any other multiple
> of 360 you choose to use.
>
> On your menu bar find the tools section and click on
> edit master povray.ini. Add the following lines anywhere
> in the ini file, save and exit.
>
> ;Initial_Frame = 1
> ;Final_Frame = 100
> ;Subset_Start_Frame = 50
> ;Subset_End_Frame = 100
> ;Cyclic_Animation = on
>
> To use these settings you need to un-comment the functions you
> want to use by removing the ";".
>
> To produce a simple continuous animation start with these settings:
>
> Initial_Frame = 1
> Final_Frame = 10
> Cyclic_Animation = on
>
> This will produce a 10 frame animation.
>
> The initial frame tells Pov you want to start with frame #1
>
> The final frame tells Pov how many frames (images) you want
> to produce. The more you specify the smoother the animation
> but the larger the animation file size. You will later learn how
> to balance the # vs. file size as you gain experiance.
>
> The use cyclic animation tells Pov you want it to produce
> an animation that will loop continuously. If your animation
> had an object moving in a straight line this would be of no use
> to you. Since we are looking at an object that is going to turn
> 360 degrees on it's axis this is a perfect example of when to use
> it.
>
> The other two settings can be used to render only a
> portion of the frames that make up an animation. Say
> you wanted only to look at the end of your scene,
> before rendering 1000 frames, to make sure everything
> ends up where it is supposed to. This will allow you to
> to so. It's not normally needed however.
>
> There are many other examples in the docs and I
> strongly recommend you read the section on using
> the clock values in your scenes and the section 4
> tutorial on animation.
>
> Don't forget to re-comment the animation lines in the
> master povray.ini when you are not doing animation
> or else the next non animation scene you try to run
> will run the exact same image for however many frames
> you have specified in the final frames section.
>
> Need more help ?
>
> Let me know.
>
> K.Tyler
>
> I can be reached at: tyl### [at] pacbellnet
thank you for the animation tutorial Ken !
I was wondering if you or someone else could go one step
further and do a mini-tutorial on Dave's Targa Animator. It seems this
programs runs in DOS(Dark Ominous Space ) and does not make sense to me
after reading the Read Me file.
Maybe a step-by-step of the above scene would be cool.
Is there a WIN95 program that inputs/outputs the same files
as DTA or if not, maybe some skilled programmer could design one. If Taps
could do it for a Height-field generator why can't they make something for
Animation??
thanks for listening
GAR
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BoDonna wrote:
> thank you for the animation tutorial Ken !
> I was wondering if you or someone else could go one step
> further and do a mini-tutorial on Dave's Targa Animator. It seems this
> programs runs in DOS(Dark Ominous Space ) and does not make sense to me
> after reading the Read Me file.
> Maybe a step-by-step of the above scene would be cool.
> Is there a WIN95 program that inputs/outputs the same files
> as DTA or if not, maybe some skilled programmer could design one. If Taps
> could do it for a Height-field generator why can't they make something for
> Animation??
>
> thanks for listening
> GAR
I think I can offer you something a little better that my command line options
for DTA.
Take a look in the POV-Ray docs under section 3 which describes
the use of .ini files with POV-Ray. Then in one of your POV-Ray
subdirectories you find an .ini file called tgafli.ini. This was written by
those incredible members of the pov team that seem to somehow think
of everything. When activated this .ini file will allow you to render however
many frames you specified in the final frames section, then it will
automatically
call DTA, and then compile your animation for you using DTA. You can
edit this file to change the final animation size, resolution, and type. Using
the
format of this .ini file you can use it as a foot print to call other animation
packages
to compile your rendered frames.
You asked about other animation packages and there are several available.
One I'm falling in love with is a shareware package called Main Actor.
I think the URL for this is http://www.mainconcept.de but if it doesn't work
I'm not responsible. It's 100 degrees F here today and my brain hurts.
Another favorite of many people is called Video For DOS of VFD. It
is of course another dos based program.
If you absolutely must have some DTA parameters to pass to the DTA
program here are some that should work but mind you I'm doing this
from memory and as such might fail miserably.
Let's assume you have named you animation test.pov. You have told
POV-Ray to render 10 frames for this animation. You wait until POV-Ray
has finished rendering these ten frames.
Somewhere on your drive you now have ten .tga files.
They will be listed as test001.tga, test002.tga, test003.tga ... etc.
Pov automatically adds the extra three digits for you as it renders each one.
Copy or move them to where you have DTA installed if it is different from
where the tga files are located.
Go to that directory and type the following at a dos prompt:
dta test*. /otest
This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory called test
and to produce an animation called test.fli
dta test*. /a1 /otest
This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory starting with test,
take the average between 1 frames (read the dta docs for more info)
and then produce an animation called test.fli. Average is a nice option
for creating motion blur : )
dta test*. /x2 /otest
Same as above but instead expands each frame by looking at the objects
position in the image and the position in the frames before and after the
frame it's working on (again the dta docs can explain it better than I can).
Your original 10 frames are now expanded to 20 (30 ?) frames.
This function can help smooth out the gaps between images in your
animation. This also can be a powerful feature. Use this when doing test
renderings for your animations. Ten frames is usually considered
too low a number to get a good animation. But if you just want a quick
preview, render ten quick frames, and use the expand command and it will
do a good job of showing you what your animation would look like if you
rendered many more frames.
dta test*. /s200 /otest
This tells DTA to take all tga files in this directory called test
and slow down the playback of your animation to a speed of 200
milliseconds per frame (I'm not sure how this is implemented but it works).
You will find on many of the shorter animations that you try to produce
they seem to play back way to fast to be useful. Use this command to slow
your animation down. A range of /s50 to /s300 is a good place to start
until you understand the option.
Well that about sucks me dry for information on animations and using
DTA. If I seem to have missed something let me know and I'll see
if I can fill in the blanks.
Happy raytracing and enjoy your new found skills.
K.Tyler
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K. Tyler wrote in message <35E9F2D8.B5FC3BF3@pacbell.net>...
>BoDonna wrote:
>
snipped
> You asked about other animation packages and there are several
available.
>One I'm falling in love with is a shareware package called Main Actor.
>I think the URL for this is http://www.mainconcept.de but if it doesn't
work
>I'm not responsible. It's 100 degrees F here today and my brain hurts.
>Another favorite of many people is called Video For DOS of VFD. It
>is of course another dos based program.
snipped
>
>K.Tyler
>
I swear by VFD, it is great! I also love smacker (www.radgametools.com)
It is a windows program that can make files that can be played back on
almost any platform (dos, mac, win, I think some video game consoles...)
the .smk files it makes arer only 8 bit, but it has some fantastic color
reduction, so you can barely (if at all) tell the difference between a 24
bit anim and an 8 bit smacker file. It does take a fairly long time to
compile the frames, but it really is a very powerful tool, and free for
/personal/ use.
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