>> * POV doesn't have a GUI for animation.

> But the author of the aforementioned app hopes to get that working
> sometime this year...

Heh. I wondered when you'd add that to LionSnake and join the dark side! ;-)

AFAIK, the early days of Pixar animation used a POV=SDL sort of approach.
They have a proprietary interface called 'Marionette.' Characters were
rigged with 'avars' (articulation variables), and characters were animated
using a spreadsheet sort of interface. Time (in frames) ran along the 'x'
axis, and 'avars' on the 'y' axis. To animate a character, you could either
click in a cell and enter a value, or click a cell and drag the mouse to
change the cell value.

A lot's changed since then, although if you check out the 'extras' in "The
Incredibles" video, you can see that same interface is being used.

There are only a handful of free animation programs that are capable of
supporting the features that are needed for character animation - bones,
morphs, and so on. By their nature, most have a pretty steep learning
curve. Although it's subjective, it's generally safe to say that the more
features an application has, the more difficult it is to learn.

Problematically, most don't support POV. Here are the ones that I'm aware
of:

* Blender: Very functional. They've added an internal raytracer as well as
export to Yafray and Sunflow, so I don't know if POV is supported anymore.

* Art of Illusion: This is another nice program, written in Java. It has
it's own advanced raytracer, so there's no export to POV.

* Anim8or: Pretty easy to use, and more animation functionality has been
added. Because of licensing issues, POV is not supported.

* K3D: Renderman only. I've never seen an animation done with this.

In the 'beta' category, I'll add the following, since they both support POV:

* JPatch: Still in beta. Exports to POV for rendering, not POV-SDL.

* LionSnake: Still in development.

So not only is animation hard, but animation using POV is harder, because
it's decades behind other programs. It'll be interesting to see how
LionSnake turns out.

Personally, I'm using JPatch, but with Inyo (my own raytracer) instead of
POV. You've got to eat your own dogfood, right?

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