Hi people.

In a film documentary about wales I made lots of animations from so called
"d-tag" data. These data came from a little device, "tagged" to an animal
(beaked wales, ore sperm wales).
In this video the hole background has been rendered with Povray. Only the wale
in the front is rendered in a commercial 3D-program, using the PovRay rendering
as a background image.

Couple of times I was thinking about to use bones inside of PovRay by defining a
mesh2 object, bones and the animation and PovRay will do the deforming process
it self, to save time, work and the whole converting process of the geometry,
frame by frame.

Doing the process of programming the application to build the mesh data. I'll
post the results and the program here.

The first finish for me is, to have a program that takes the d-tag-data and
build a complete wale animation it self. The user only has to give it the
geometry from the wale (only a still frame) and the position of the bones,
defined in an extra file.

Ps.: What you see in this little movie is an original movement of a beaked wale,
recorded with one of these devices. Note: The light shuts are symbolic for the
click sound, the wale use for orientation under water. The wale uses those
clicks to "see" under water. Thats, why I'm using the light. The camera is
locked to the animal in this scene.

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Attachments:
Download 'clicks.m1v.mpg' (669 KB)