Re: On animation, physics and modeling...

Hi!

On Thursday 18 July 2002 14:12, Jörg Walter wrote:
> Hi!
> What I like about it is the constraint-based editing: Instead of placing
> the object in space using three views, you have to define how the object is
> constrained by some other object. You can easily express things like "The
> base of that sphere lies on the floor plane" (free movement in 2
> dimensions) or "The center axis of the sword handle lies on the center axis
> of the blade" (free movement in one dimension) or even "the end of the
> cylinder must be at the same location as the sphere (representing a joint)"
> (no movement at all).
[...]

Agreed!

> Finally, animations: Apart from what was said above, I like the idea of
> scriptability that was suggested in another thread. But many (if not most)
> problems can be solved using simple equations, especially now that povray
> has the clock_delta variable for incremental calculations and splines in
> calculations.

I don't think the clock_delta can be used for incremental calculations. As far 
as I read the new povray documentation it is just another constant you can 
use in your animation. You still have to calculate the scene for each frame 
because you don't know the values of the last frame.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

> Please make it possible to build an animation in a single
> povray file, this makes using external tools much easier. (Should be
> simple: allow Povray expressions anywhere a vector/number is allowed, and
> emit just one source file if no scripts are used). Using tools like
> http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/3378/dgtl.html would still
> enable the use of split up time lines. Hmm... after thinking about it, if
> you use the Povray language itself for scripting, even more complicated
> scripts would not need more than one source file. IMHO the language is
> "okay enough" for this, even more so since 3.5. After all, this is
> kPOVmodeler, not k3dstudio.

It is KPovModeler at the moment, but we should keep the dependency on povray 
as low as possible. If the plugin API is finished, we will support any format 
and therefore any renderer that has similar objects and textures.

> P.S. on an entirely unrelated matter: Is there a plugin architecture so you
> can add suport for some of the well-known addon programs for generating
> nice objects?

There will be one in the 1.1 version. We discussed a plugin api recently on 
this list. You can read it in the archive on http://lists.kde.org

Andreas

-- 
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 Andreas Zehender, Dipl. Ing. (BA)
 Student, 10th semester computer science
 http://www.azweb.de
 [email protected] | [email protected]      
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