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To preface, I am a complete newb when it comes to any sort of ray-tracing or
animation applications. That said my boss has assigned me the job of taking
a real-time animated scene currently coded to render in OpenGL and somehow
ram it through a free ray-tracing application until it looks pretty. The
animated scene uses a skeleton model modeled in maya or something and it
has walking and arm-moving animations while it walks around the scene and
the camera moves around watching him. I know it would be possible to run
the OpenGL application and export the scene every frame, then loading that
scene into POV-Ray, render it and save each frame to a TGA and then compile
them together to make a movie. I want to know if there is a more integrated
way to do this, such as using the clock function to animate the skeleton
model and translate him around the scene and actually do it all from within
POV-Ray. Has this kind of stuff been done? I haven't seen many animated
models in the example animations around the web. Is it even possible? Any
help is really appreciated as my job is on the line.
cheers
-oct
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It sounds like for modeling and movement the hard part is already done. For
your purposes it seems like it'd be a waste to re-do it all in Pov-Ray. You
don't have to do each frame separately though. You can export the meshes
for the individual bones, and then put the position information in separate
numbered files, which are called from a large #switch statement, (or just
put the data directly into the #switch statement.) Use clock or
frame_number to select the right data for that frame. Anyway, yeah I'd go
ahead and do the frame-by-frame method, but with a little automation.
Charles
"octogonalMonk" <fucrate ::at:: gmail ::dot:: com> wrote:
> To preface, I am a complete newb when it comes to any sort of ray-tracing or
> animation applications. That said my boss has assigned me the job of taking
> a real-time animated scene currently coded to render in OpenGL and somehow
> ram it through a free ray-tracing application until it looks pretty. The
> animated scene uses a skeleton model modeled in maya or something and it
> has walking and arm-moving animations while it walks around the scene and
> the camera moves around watching him. I know it would be possible to run
> the OpenGL application and export the scene every frame, then loading that
> scene into POV-Ray, render it and save each frame to a TGA and then compile
> them together to make a movie. I want to know if there is a more integrated
> way to do this, such as using the clock function to animate the skeleton
> model and translate him around the scene and actually do it all from within
> POV-Ray. Has this kind of stuff been done? I haven't seen many animated
> models in the example animations around the web. Is it even possible? Any
> help is really appreciated as my job is on the line.
>
> cheers
> -oct
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Hey, thanks for getting back to me so quickly, after posting I looked at the
forums and got a little worried that it wasn't really that active. You've
proved me wrong.
I'm still a little unsure of what you're recommendation is, though. Is it a
good idea to try to put some animation playing inside some POV-Ray code? I
know it would be pretty simple to just script in linux and let the renderer
run overnight, or overmonth as the case may be, if that's what you mean by
automation. If you do suggest that I export the meshes and animate
somewhat with the clock, is there refrence documentation I could look to
which could tell me how to do it? I know I need to learn about animations
and bones in general, but I couldn't find a lot of documentation about
animating in POV-Ray other than translating and rotating solid geometry.
cheers
-oct
"Charles C" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> It sounds like for modeling and movement the hard part is already done. For
> your purposes it seems like it'd be a waste to re-do it all in Pov-Ray. You
> don't have to do each frame separately though. You can export the meshes
> for the individual bones, and then put the position information in separate
> numbered files, which are called from a large #switch statement, (or just
> put the data directly into the #switch statement.) Use clock or
> frame_number to select the right data for that frame. Anyway, yeah I'd go
> ahead and do the frame-by-frame method, but with a little automation.
> Charles
>
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"octogonalMonk" <fucrate ::at:: gmail ::dot:: com> wrote:
> Hey, thanks for getting back to me so quickly, after posting I looked at the
> forums and got a little worried that it wasn't really that active. You've
> proved me wrong.
>
> I'm still a little unsure of what you're recommendation is, though.
What I think Charles is saying is;
You have, or what you could have, is a series of meshes of a skeleton model.
Possibly named skeleton001.obj to skeleton100.obj or skeleton001.inc if Maya
Poseray.)
In an INI file for the animation settings
Initial_Frame=1
Final_Frame=100
Initial_Clock=0
Final_Clock=1
In the POV file
#declare My_Object = concat(skeleton,str(frame_number,-1,0),".inc")
/* This gives you the series of meshes */
#include My_Object
/* This calls the meshes */
This will give you the animation but not much understanding of bones in
general. Working with bones and Inverse Kinematics would be a major
Stephen
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"Stephen" <mcavoys_AT_aolDOT.com> wrote in message
news:web.44fe9081c1d6ecebf1cb1e660@news.povray.org...
> "octogonalMonk" <fucrate ::at:: gmail ::dot:: com> wrote:
>> Hey, thanks for getting back to me so quickly, after posting I looked at
>> the
>> forums and got a little worried that it wasn't really that active.
>> You've
>> proved me wrong.
>>
>> I'm still a little unsure of what you're recommendation is, though.
>
> What I think Charles is saying is;
> You have, or what you could have, is a series of meshes of a skeleton
> model.
> Possibly named skeleton001.obj to skeleton100.obj or skeleton001.inc if
> Maya
> has a Pov-Ray output. (You can convert the obj's to include files using
> Poseray.)
> In an INI file for the animation settings
>
> Initial_Frame=1
> Final_Frame=100
> Initial_Clock=0
> Final_Clock=1
>
> In the POV file
>
> #declare My_Object = concat(skeleton,str(frame_number,-1,0),".inc")
> /* This gives you the series of meshes */
> #include My_Object
> /* This calls the meshes */
> This will give you the animation but not much understanding of bones in
> general. Working with bones and Inverse Kinematics would be a major
> project, in Pov. I'm sure that someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> Stephen
>
I'd agree with Charles and Stephen. If your job depends on it then keep it
simple and use what you've got. Animation and particularly character
animation aren't for the novice or the faint hearted, so if you can readily
generate a file per frame then that would be the easiest solution.
If you are using file names like 'skeleton001.inc' though, I think the
concat function should read:
#declare My_Object = concat("skeleton",str(frame_number,-3,0),".inc")
where the word 'skeleton' is in quotes and the string length would be '-3'
(where the negative sign says to pad with zeros).
Regards,
Chris B.
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"Chris B" <c_b### [at] btconnect comnospam> wrote:
> If you are using file names like 'skeleton001.inc' though, I think the
> concat function should read:
> #declare My_Object = concat("skeleton",str(frame_number,-3,0),".inc")
> where the word 'skeleton' is in quotes and the string length would be '-3'
> (where the negative sign says to pad with zeros).
>
Yes, that's an Opps! :-(
Stephen
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Hope it works out Oct :-) Yeah that's pretty much what I meant by
"automation" except I was thinking of within POV-Ray using something like
the lines Stephen and Chris B mentioned. The slightly more complicated and
probably-not-even-worth-it version was to treat each bone as a separate
object rather than the skeletin as a whole. This would still be simpler
than making a bones-system because your POV script doesn't need to know how
each bone relates to the next. On the other hand, getting it done sounds
like it's more important than any other "feature." In this case, I suppose
it'd just save disk space which you'll get back anyway.
Charles
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Thanks a lot for you help guys. Right now I'm just going to focus on
exporting a small number of frames and just figuring out how to use
POV-Ray, format my scene to the correct pov type and just run 100 frames
the easy-but-tedious way. There's not really going to be any value in me
learning more of POV-Ray than I need to finish the project, so I think i'll
just create some scripts and let the boring way run overnight or nights.
It is good to know, however, if I do decide to get more into POV-Ray that I
can find great people like you to help me out, thanks again.
-oct
"Charles C" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Hope it works out Oct :-) Yeah that's pretty much what I meant by
> "automation" except I was thinking of within POV-Ray using something like
> the lines Stephen and Chris B mentioned. The slightly more complicated and
> probably-not-even-worth-it version was to treat each bone as a separate
> object rather than the skeletin as a whole. This would still be simpler
> than making a bones-system because your POV script doesn't need to know how
> each bone relates to the next. On the other hand, getting it done sounds
> like it's more important than any other "feature." In this case, I suppose
> it'd just save disk space which you'll get back anyway.
> Charles
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