Re: animation

On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 05:05, u15051 wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Yes Andreas, the Flash animation system is great. What do you mean with:
> > I think everything should be made with scripting!!!
> Should it mean that we program this as script or does it mean that the user 
> have to write scripts for his animation.

To me, that means that an "explosion" fx, would actually be an explosion
script which understands how to "explode" various shapes.

The advantages of doing it this way is simple.  If someone comes up with
a really nice "explosion" modification, it can be easily shared by means
of sharing a script.  This means, kpov isn't changed but can still
visually represent and/or communicate with the new script.  No changes
required.

Now, I think everyone is starting to see why sharing meta data is a good
thing.  It allows kpov, for example, to understand the translated
geometry.  Caching the results and/or meta data associated with a tick
in time becomes easy and furthermore, allows kpov to more quickly step
through time showing an accurate depiction of a scene.  Clearly a strong
python <-> kpov interface would need to be developed to support this,
but I think it's very doable.

BTW, the Boost.Python package allows python to call native C++ code with
very little effort from what I've seen.

> 
> If the user writes his script in our animation scripting language (phyton?) it 
> is "very" simple for us to develop this. But I think it is not so user 
> friendly. A real gui for animation (but of course scripting is also possible, 
> like Flash) is very usable for simple Animations. With scripts you can do 
> some complex animations (with expressions). Simple gui supported animations 
> could be: path animations (simple drawing a curve, then selecing curve and 
> object and then press a button that assigns the object to the path (curve)), 
> ....
> 

I think if we really sit down and figure this thing out, we can
encompass both worlds by having the scripts communicate back to kpov.

> The result of the gui created animation is a script. This is processed by the 
> animation scripting engine. This way is nearly the same like kpm uses povray 
> to create images. You always have the chance to edit the povray code for 
> inserting special things.
> 
> We could make some predefined things (e.g. explosion) that deforms the object. 
> This will be a script that is inserted. To do this you only have to select an 
> object and press the button for deformation - explosion. 

This also opens the door for kpov to also generate python scripts and/or
interface to a body of scripts to perform common actions.


Greg

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