I am interested in receiving any and all critiques of an idea I have about an extension of POV-Ray's ability to animate.  Since I don't really know how to program, and I have very little sense of how POV-Ray actually works, it may be a really stupid idea--I just don't know enough to be able to say.  Even if it is, I would appreciate hearing that so I can put the idea to bed.

My idea has three parts:

    1.  What if the program could take information not only about the surfaces and textures of ray traced objects, but also about their physical characteristics.  Things such as mass, stiffness, co-efficient of friction, viscosity, etc.

    2.  What if it could also process information about forces acting on objects.  This type of information could include global settings such as gravity, or wind (could this be modeled using texture map patterns?), as well as local forces acting on specific objects.  It might do two things with this information: first, it might set up motion vectors for objects based on the information given in the properties statements (see 1, above), and, second, it might deform objects based on the same information

    3.  Finally, what if POV could process motion vectors  and deformations from the reactions and interactions of specific groups of objects (specified by the user) and calculate new sets of deformations and vectors based on these new sets of data.  I mean by this that POV would be able to calculate the interaction of specified objects, allowing them to bounce off each other, or roll along, or otherwise interact, or deform each other according to the individual properties of the objects.  I don't know if the program could use its ability to "see" surfaces by shooting rays in order to check for these interactions between specified objects in a scene, but that is my initial thought.

In creating an animation, then, one would specify global and object properties, specify forces at play in the scene, and let the program do the rest of the work in calculating the motion, deformation and events in the scene over the length of the animation in question.

One of the things that I like about this idea is that it would make many types of impressive animation fairly simple to pull off.  A ball rolling down a height field, or a foot stepping into wet sand might become basic animation sequences, rather than the results of hard labor and much skill.  I can imagine POV even pulling off complex animation such as an object floating on the surface of the ocean, reacting realistically to the forces at work, or the motion of wind in the leaves of a tree, some time in the near future, when computers get fast enough and large enough to handle this kind of complexity.

Another thing I like about it is that it seems to me like a simple extension of the way in which POV-Ray currently works (conceptually, I mean--making POV-Ray do this might be an entirely different story).  My idea is that POV would simply get the ability to store Physical Properties in the same way that it stores textures, and that it would work with those and the forces at play in any animation to create "photo realisitc" types of motion in its function as generator of animation, just as it creates "photo realistic" images from its scene parser and renderer.

Thank you for any comments you have about this idea.  I will be grateful for anything you could say either to squelch it, express interest or boredom with it, or improve it in any way.

my e-mail address is: ericfisher@wans.net

Thanks again for any replies,

Eric Fisher