 | | My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
The textual and the graphical ***...*** The history of computers, user interfaces, and LDraw are basically the same: 1. a command-line tool offers the initial functionality 2. a point & click GUI layer hides the initial tool 3. eventually everybody (...) (19 years ago, 21-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) I'm no boffin, but doesn't POVray already do this? Allister (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Take a look at Maya and Lightwave. The concepts have been all thought out already. www.alias.com/maya (URL) you want an LDraw animation package, you are first going to have a willing programmer TEAM. That is right, animation applications take (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) MLCad + L3P + POVray does static pictures, greatly limited when it comes to animation scripting capability. Considerations, - damien (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) May be the concepts in these sofware are fine for 3D artists, but nobody has ever experienced and validated them for complete lego animation. Take "Revenge of the Brick" as an example: it's more about adding some bricks in traditionnal (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Dear Damien, I'm not 100% sure what you are saying for a lot of this post but I do have to say that writing an animation scripting language, even utilising what else is around, is a very difficult task. As a simple example of how hard this (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) I have been working on what you want for 5 years. At first I came up with Lani as a language. (URL) sucks. I now use POV-Ray. Have you learned POV-Ray? Have you seen this: (URL) fully agree, POV-Ray isn't as powerful as, say, Maya. But it is (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
I've had a basic animation system working in LeoCAD for a while, I tried to do things as close to how 3DS works as I could since I didn't have much experience with animations and I figured the guys at Discreet know what they are doing (I'm not (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) At the very least you should read the manuals to see what techniques the artists use. They aren't stupid. And they do apply to Lego animation because I have read some manuals so I know. Lightwave is only $895, which isn't that expensive (how (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) (URL) Personal Learning Edition> is free for non-commercial use. (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) How much does Linux cost? How much does OpenOffice cost? How much does Gimp cost? How much do thousands of titles of quite useful free software cost? I think you are missing the point. Professional software titles are often out of range for (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) And I'll add to that the animated GIMP (forgotten its name) is used by Dreamworks and other big animation studios. Tim (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) I think it would be wise to include a step 3.5: We first need some means for saving animation data, i.e. we need to design and agree upon a file format for time-varying LDraw data. Without that, we might end up with the situation that is still (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) My computer is a Celeron-Mendocino 500Mhz, 128Mb RAM, Win98se. Thus, even free is too costly because i can't afford the required hardware. damien (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Yeah it's already difficult enough and i don't say i will try. And if i try i will not embark anyone as a collective project can have a negative impact when it fails: people who have invested time and effort want someone to be blamed and (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Right. When free software exists and is good enough to outperform commercial solutions in some applications, it will of course be used. The extremely successful combination Apache/PHP springs to mind - lots of web sites who could easily afford (...) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) I downloaded Lani long time ago, not deeply tested it but i wouldn't say it sucks. I know about POV-Ray, ray-tracing primitives and Constructive Solid Geometry. My lego POV-Ray gallery: (URL) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Artists are certainly not stupid and i will learn from them as much as i can. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel, neither do i. (...) Damien My lego POV-Ray gallery: (URL) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) You mean a movement should be a continuous function rather than successives position interpolations. If that's you mean then i agree. If not, can you be more explicit? Damien web page: (URL) (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) XML has poor human-readibility. The text format should be accepted before it has a GUI front-end, and that can be only if it's readeable enough. Anyway, who writes the interpreter decides the format. Considerations, Damien (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Poor XML has poor human-readibility. XML in general is fine. <part> <no> 13 </no> <pos> 10,12, 15 </pos> </part> is quite readable. (19 years ago, 22-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) The Maya PLE watermarks all of the renders and is very limited. Don't use it unless you plan on buying a full version or something. James (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) There are 2 ways you can approach this. Animation involves time. The LDraw format does not include anything in it to deal with time. The first approach would be to add something to deal with time to the LDraw format. This is a very bad idea (...) (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Yes, I must have. I thought the point was that Damien wants a scripting language to do animation. And I keep trying to say POV-Ray is it. Or something comercial. Don't try to reinvent the wheel like I did with Lani. Learn the current (...) (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Many thanks to you James, your experience is priceless to me. Before i attempt anything i will now carefully consider: * what POV-Ray can do * how it does * whether i can do easier/better * if people don't want to learn POV-Ray, then they (...) (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Considering what we have here, I think we need: * A Lego animation file/script format which positions LDraw parts in relation to others, which is then distilled (using a front end) into POV scripts - so POV still handles the rendering. * A GUI (...) (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) You do not need a new format. MPD's do the job just fine. I now realize I need to write a follow up to this article: (URL) it I will show how modeling using these guidelines leads to animation bliss. (...) LDraw files are perfect for models, (...) (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Animators use Maya and Lightwave. (...) Your whole thread has got me thinking. I am convinced you do not want to try to extend LDraw to do animation and that POV-Ray already does what you want. But that doesn't mean things can't be done to (...) (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) That is a great idea. Why recreate the wheel when you can add a joystick instead? Tim (19 years ago, 23-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) I mostly agree with James (use POV-Ray for animations), but I'll throw my 2 cents in anyway ... It seems like an LDraw-based animation format is reasonably possible, with the following requirements/additions: - Use MPD format. This isn't (...) (19 years ago, 24-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Unfortunately, I am very busy right now. Once again, I have to move and it sure takes its toll from my resources. But I'd like to repeat what I've said earlier on creating LDraw based animations. We have LD4D, we have POV-ray's support for (...) (19 years ago, 24-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
It appears from this discussion that methods already exist, its just that they are not particularly easy to use or accessible. Whatever solution we choose, we need to think about usability. I am a developer, and even I dont like having pull things (...) (19 years ago, 25-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Agreed. (...) Ewe!!! I'll just throw in here that doing animations from text files is possible. But it is a nightmare once you want anything slightly complicated. I re-rendered the start and end keyframes in the PCS Dogfight animation so many (...) (19 years ago, 26-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) If we followed that logic, LDraw would never have existed in the first place. When LDraw started out, there were already plenty of 3D modeling systems. Heck, there were already lego-brick subsets of 3D modeling systems. Yet LDraw does exist, (...) (19 years ago, 26-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) In this context - a very simple or basic extension language could be used to add an animation block with keyframe/timecode information. Then, when you need to break out the big guns, you can embed POV code into it for complex techniques. The (...) (19 years ago, 26-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Get ready for a book... You've started to describe exactly what I want to avoid. 1. Doing something so simplistic would never be able to hold my interest, and I suspect it would not interest anyone else who intended to do anything complex. (...) (19 years ago, 27-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) That is a good point. Take a look at the .png format. They have made a fully extensible format which covers the simple, and covers the complex. I would suggest that any animation format should be based on an equally extensible format, probably (...) (19 years ago, 27-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) That's also my approach. I have never used any animation system. I don't know what are the best animation concepts. As a programmer i only know what i can eventually do (my skills), what is my preferred approach (my talent) and what i consider (...) (19 years ago, 27-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) What's the Pro with MPD files in this case? My experince is that it makes programming much, much more difficult, and the gain is...(?) In LDA, I inlined all submodels into one model DAT* file for each Frame, and then one Master DAT file that (...) (19 years ago, 27-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) Not really a big deal, i could change my mind if that's too difficult for me to program. (...) It's much worse than a new syntax. A whole new, entirely different programming paradigm to learn. A whole new program semantic. Almost any (...) (19 years ago, 28-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) ones people are more familiar with. Could you outline any advantages is might have over, say, Perl (which also has inbuilt strings and memory management). Tim (19 years ago, 28-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Reply to me
|
|
(...) Follow up set to .off-topic.geek (19 years ago, 28-Aug-05, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
|
| |
| | LDraw animation: Camera.dat and Look_at.dat [DAT]
|
|
One more thing: I will use CAMERA.dat and LOOK_AT.dat in each Frame file in my planned LDA (hopefully LDA2005...). I find them very handy, anyone can use them and move them around in MLCad or whatever LDraw editor. This is how I made them, but (...) (19 years ago, 28-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
On 27/08/05, Damien GUICHARD <damien.guichard@wanadoo.fr> wrote: <snip> (...) <snip> First thing I should point out on this thread is that I *do* have experience developing tool for professional animation software, professional CAD software with (...) (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) ALthough I have no experience in this area, I have to completely agree with you here. If I wanted to make an animated film, the last thing I would want to do is script the whole thing. Maybe it was fine for games designers in days of CGA and (...) (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
I may very well abandon my LDraw based LDA2001 project when I... * see something that really works, and when I... * understand enough of it to make my own animations from it. (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
In lugnet.cad, danny staple <orionrobots@gmail.com> wrote: <snip> (...) <snip> Wow, that really hurts. Especially the last sentence. Thanksfully i know you play role reversal: what you mean is users would immediatly exclude my tool from their choice (...) (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) (* off-topic discussion *) Design and implementation are not as independant as i wish. As part of the design requirements, i pointed moves should be functions and be as composable as functions are. Practically that means the language must (...) (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) Hi Damien, The correct place for your response would be .off-topic.geek which is where I set the follow up to in the response post. I thought you were proposing to write a scripting language, but now I suspect you mean that people should use (...) (19 years ago, 29-Aug-05, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
Why not develop something abstract. If you come up with a way to notate an animation in any langauge, perhaps it will catch on. James (...) (19 years ago, 30-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) How are keyframes internally structured and saved to disk? Are they arrays, hashes, and how is the interpolation between keyframes usually handled? I haven't had time to research it myself, and I'm not sure I would even be able to find the (...) (19 years ago, 30-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
I wonder if anyone remembers the 80s game "Story Machine" from Spinnaker Software (publishers of "Face Maker" and other silly products.) This program acted out the sentences you typed in. It was a kind of self-illustrating text adventure. For (...) (19 years ago, 30-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) I think you may need to explain you choices further. Python supports variable numbers of function arguments, as does Perl. In Python it is relatively easy to check the types of the arguments, and implement overloading and type checking inside (...) (19 years ago, 30-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) First I should apologise if I sounded harsh - I have spent the last few months of my day-job dealing with a nightmare UI built by other coders with absolutely no end-user consultation. So I recognised similar patterns and had already gotten (...) (19 years ago, 30-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: LDraw Animation - Why MPD?
|
|
(...) (* off-topic discussion *) To create a matrix the OCaml code is: let x = Array.make_matrix nrow ncol 0.0 I acknowledge: * OCaml is not widely used * even more esoteric than Perl would be a complete turn off * popular is not a word I would (...) (19 years ago, 1-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad.dev)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) Ok, you lost me. Are you talking about paths as lines and curves or paths as in parent.child.grandchild? Because you mention XML and objects, I'm confused (could mean XPath or OO...). (...) Yes! I talk about overriding default origin here: (...) (19 years ago, 5-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) I did mean paths as in lines and curves, as I hope became apparent later on. (...) would apply to this technique, is that it may make building steps a little unnatural. Though you might be able to get it to look good in LPub... (...) Yes - a (...) (19 years ago, 5-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
Ok, this post took me a long time to get through... (...) Ah. I've never cared for instructions... I didn't take that into account when I wrote the article... (...) I was only familiar with POV-Ray (well, I'm starting to be familiar with others now (...) (19 years ago, 14-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
Hi James, whew - this is getting to be a big mail, but I will try and answer in situ... (...) I suppose I consider it part of the concept, so then I, or others can build what I built, although given the original LDraw file, some may be able to work (...) (19 years ago, 15-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
Ok. So this is exactly the reason I didn't want anyone to invent a new animation scripting language for Legos! It is something new and is in danger of: being a sucky 1.0 release (or worse, never reaching 1.0), and not getting widespread use and so (...) (19 years ago, 17-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
| |
| | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
|
|
(...) IMHO there is no reason why someone can't invent something new. Especially as anything new would be still compatible with LDraw standards (otherwise the author would have to reinvent the wheel, the LDraw library and the existing Lego-Cad tools (...) (19 years ago, 17-Sep-05, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, lugnet.animation)
|
