Hi All,

I've been thrilled with sPatch ever since it came out, but one thing that
really interested me was finding a way to animate my sPatch objects.  after
a little fiddling and coding, I threw together a little program which would
write a pov file which would animate smoothely between two keyframes of an
sPatch-exported bezier mesh.  Realizing that animated organic shapes was a
revolution for the pov world, I decided to make a real version of the
program with a windows gui, etc, which would support multiple keyframes.
Due to lack of time (I'm a student), It's been a year since I started on
this project, but I finally got something presentable put together for you
all to enjoy.  It appears that Steve Sloan beat me to the punch on releasing
a utility like this.  He posted a perl script on CGRR about a week ago which
does something similar to what my program does.

This program is useful for sPatch, but also any general pov scene you
design.  Just make a bunch of copies of your scene.  In each copy, change
the numbers arround to get a new position of your camera or object, or
whatever.  Once you have all your key positions saved in separate files,
pass the files through KeyMorph, and it will automatically generate the
animation pov file for you.

The program is still pretty basic, and probably has some bugs in it.  I've
put an expiration date of May 30 in the current version because I want to
fix some things and add some new features.

The only bug that I'm aware of is really a problem with Pov for windows.
Because the lines in the animation file are so long, pov for windows doesn't
load them fully and will give you syntax errors if you try to render from
memory.  To get arround this, just hit save before rendering and pov will
render from the file instead.

I have a bazillion little tweaks and features I'd like to add which I won't
list here, but feel free to send me any suggestions you might have, or bug
reports.

The primary release of this program is the Windows version, which I will be
continuing to develope.  I have compiled command line versions for several
other platforms though in case anyone is interested.  The currently
available platforms are:

Windows 95/NT
DOS (as soon as I can get my laptop recharged)
HPUX
Linux
Alpha

Please visit http://www.televar.com/~ceckak/keymorph for more information
and downloads.


______________________________

Ken Cecka
cec### [at] televarcom
http://www.televar.com/~ceckak
______________________________

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