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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.
Thanks, Ken, for providing this informative and comprehensive animation
mini-tutorial. I find myself in the later group of users you've
described and one of the reasons for this fact was, that I had some
problems with getting together all the information, povray docs give on
this matter. This should be solved now.
thanks again and best wishes
ReVerSi
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ReVerSi wrote:
> Thanks, Ken, for providing this informative and comprehensive animation
> mini-tutorial. I find myself in the later group of users you've
> described and one of the reasons for this fact was, that I had some
> problems with getting together all the information, povray docs give on
> this matter. This should be solved now.
>
> thanks again and best wishes
>
> ReVerSi
It's a pleasure to serve.
K.Tyler
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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,
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,
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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hey ken,
i do believe i just sent a personal email to you when i meant to post
to this group. sorry bout that! the gist of it:
nothing against dave's targa animator, but if you want to work with a
window's app, fast movie processor will crunch your sequenced
bitmaps into an AVI and it is very very user friendly (even i had no
problem using it). it is freeware.
the only problem i had was with some pretty bad artifacting, which
was solved by changing the codec bit rate to 1200.
good luck, miker
K. Tyler <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote in message
news:35E9F920.E4CD24B8@pacbell.net...
> 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,
> 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,
> 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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Quick question about the clock "variable"
With the following settings:
Initial_Frame=1
Final_Frame=10
Initial_Clock=0
Final_Clock=1
Cyclic_Animation=on
I assume clock will equal 0.0 for frame 1, the question is about frame 2,
and 10.
Will the clock equal 0.1 for frame 2? If so will the clock equal 0.9 for
frame 10?
Or
Will the clock equal 0.111... for frame 2, and 1.0 for frame 10?
K. Tyler <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote in message
news:35E6A0A5.49A142BE@pacbell.net...
> 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
>
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Mike White <mik### [at] salesdatasolutionscom> wrote:
: Cyclic_Animation=on
: Will the clock equal 0.1 for frame 2? If so will the clock equal 0.9 for
: frame 10?
Yes.
--
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/
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