Re: On animation, physics and modeling...

On Thursday, 18. July 2002 17:07, Andreas Zehender wrote:

> > 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.

Well, somebody else should - My knowledge actually stems from 3.0, I didn't 
keep up-to-date as thoroughly as I learned 3.0 syntax. But the 3.5 manual 
says something like that. If it's not usable today, it will be later. MegaPov 
has something called "persistent variables", this sounds like it is what's 
needed. Other renderers may already have that feature.

> 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.

Okay, agreed (mostly). Still, my original desire holds: Make parameters based 
on formulas possible, whatever syntax it might be, and export them using the 
target renderers expression language. About scripting in general, maybe if 
someone (this might also be me, I don't know in advance when such an itch 
starts itching) writes/ports a povray interpreter and the user writes scripts 
in povray, then those scripts can be exported as-is for povray scenes - same 
would apply to other renderers' scripting languages. Given a decent scripting 
architecture, this should be doable as a plugin, thus is mostly independent 
of development progress in general.
Basically, the more high-level information you process, the better can 
generated source files be. Having a single one instead of hundreds sure makes 
a difference.

-- 
CU
	Joerg

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