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Subject: 
Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Wed, 24 Aug 2005 15:38:31 GMT
Viewed: 
2922 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Damien Guichard wrote:
Before i attempt anything i will now carefully consider:
* what POV-Ray can do
* how it does
* whether i can do easier/better

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 totally required, but as James has documented, it
is a Very Good Idea.
- Support the LDLite language extension.  This includes meta-statements such as
ROTATE, TRANSLATE, SCALE, POINT, and MATRIX, and enhanced syntax to use defined
POINTs and MATRIXs in normal LDraw statements.
- Some concept of variables and expressions.
- A Timer system variable
- An ANIMATE meta-statement, giving the paremeters to control the animation.
- An IF/END IF block meta-statement.  This would be important for any animation
other than very simple single-action animations.

OK, that list is longer than I thought it would be.  But most of the items on
the list are relatively straightforward to implement.  At least, they are well
known and well-solved programming problems.  The code to support LDLite language
can be gotten/adapted from the ldglite source code.  That gives a base for block
statements and variables.  Parsing/interpreting expressions is a common
scripting challenge, the logic/code should be available somewhere.

A program to process such a script could take an animation (.LDA?) source file
as input, and generate a standard LDR file (or series of files) for output.
We've already got programs that can render images, no need to reimplement that.

The key-frame processor suggested by Orion-2 is interesting, but sounds harder
to implement...

Steve



Message has 1 Reply:
  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)

Message is in Reply To:
  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)

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