Re: animation

Hi,

I've made an example how animation could be done. 
I've made some images to illustrates my thoughts. There not so beautiful, 
because the pics are drawn very fast.

http://www2.hs-harz.de/~u15051/tmp/kpm_ani_layout1.png
http://www2.hs-harz.de/~u15051/tmp/kpm_ani_layout2.png

Description:
At first you have to set some animation properties (frames per sec, end time, 
...). The number of frames is calculated from this settings. Then you can 
make some drawings in the basic frame (frame 1 or perhaps something like a 
keyframe). In other frames (expect keyframes) you cant change the objects. 
But you see the position of an object in this frame. If you switch from 
modeling mode to animation mode then the object animation composer will 
appear. With this thing you can control the whole animation. 
For animatig a sphere (look at the picture 2) you add the sphere object 
(drag'n'drop / context menu) to the composer. Now you can edit the ani 
properties of the sphere (objects could be also groups). You can add some 
basic Animation types:
- IK - inverse kinematics (e.g skeleton ani)
- Transformations ( path translation, rotation arround a point, ...)
     * assigning a curve, drawn in the 3D views to an obj. as path
- Deformations (scale, explode, ....)
- Material modifications (modify texture/material parameters
   controled by an expression, expression includes the time value)

Then you can the specific animation type (things above in the brackets) and 
set some properties. In the right side of the composer you can set the 
duration of the animation of this object. The result of this is that we now 
know the start and end frame (or time of course) of this part of animation. 

The advantage of the composer is that we could not only insert objects for 
animation, but also we could insert other media (sound) to the scene.

After animation:
The most pov tools (and pov themselfs) are creating lots of images (the 
frames) but we should create a real video(avi, mpeg, fli,...) not only a lot 
of frames. We could use some comandline tools for that 'tga2mpg' or other 
things.

> a few questions about animation:
>
> every object consists of data. An animation tool will make an animation by
> modifying the data. What happens with the original scene?

in modeling mode the object data is unmodified by the animation tool.
You can see the ani-modifications in the animation mode.

> my animation is after weeks of work 15 minutes long. Now I want to work on
> the last minute. How can I "fast forward" to the last minute?

Move the time line to  your position an begin to work.

kevin

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