Subject:
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Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Tue, 23 Aug 2005 04:43:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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2436 times
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In lugnet.cad, Stefan Gustavson wrote:
> In lugnet.cad, Timothy Gould wrote:
> > And I'll add to that the animated GIMP (forgotten its name) is used by
> > Dreamworks and other big animation studios.
>
> 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 IIS/ASP still run Apache,
> because it solves their particular problems better.
>
> My point was that even if a free software title pales in
> comparison to a commercial equivalent, it will still be
> used if it is useful at all.
> Get *any* kind of animation capabilities into the LDraw
> tools, and if it is needed at all people will probably
> start using it, and some will step forward to improve it.
> Right now, nobody knows where to begin.
>
> The LDraw file format, which is at the heart of it all,
> is a static scene description language. I think we should
> start attacking the problem there, and I would suggest
> moving on to a more modern (but of course compatible)
> file format, perhaps based on XML which has proven itself
> in a large number of applications, quite a few of them
> related to computer graphics.
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 IMO. Leave LDraw to what it was
designed to do: create models.
The second approach is to convert LDraw files to other formats that already
support time functions. There are several converters for POV-Ray, Blender,
Maya, Lightwave, etc etc. If you stick with these, than you can use their
renderers as well.
There are things you can do to make your LDraw files animation ready. Please
read this:
http://james.magnusviri.com/lego/animatable_models/
I wrote it specifically to address the parent/child or node linking that the
commercial packages support. To sum it up, when performing an action on a
parent node, it affects the children nodes. If you don't have these
relationships in your models, or if the pivot points are off, animation is a
nightmare.
It is possible to have parent/child relationships in LDraw by using MPD and
subfiles. My article talks about this. It is also possible to have
parent/child nodes in POV-Ray by using the union command.
So animation is already possible. But I'm sure what everyone wants is a 3d
animation packaged aimed at Legos ONLY. And to get that, as Damien says, you
first have to have a file format. Well, I'm suggesting POV-Ray because it is
free and many LDraw users are already familiar with it (via rendering). But
whatever format is picked is pretty much up to the programmers.
I don't see much programming going on lately though. Who would even do any of
this work? An animation GUI is a huge project. I would rather fork out $895
than wait for someone to write the app. And I'm not a pro. To me the hobby is
worth $895. I'm just lucky I've learned POV-Ray and don't have to fork out
$895.
I should also note that animations themselves are huge projects. I have found
that I don't have time to animate and make models at the same time. So I have
turned to the many LDraw files out there for scene and props. Unfortunately,
most are not set up so I can animate them without a lot of work. This is why I
have written the animatable models tutorial. And *hint hint* I could use help
with props as I'm sure would anyone else who actually started to make
animations.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
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| (...) 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)
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