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 16:06:35 GMT
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Viewed:
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2820 times
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On 23/08/05, Damien Guichard <damien.guichard@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>
> 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 probably don't want to
> learn
> a scripting language at all, so i must take into account the fact that
> easier/better may not be a sufficient motivation. a scripting language is
> still
> a scripting language, and a more powerful one can be more difficult to learn,
> raising the entry barrier even higher
> * i have supposed that any early adopter is a programmer, regarding your reply
> i
> reconsider the question. may be programmers do programming and only animators
> do
> animation, and they don't want to invest time in a programming language and
> even
> less in a new programming language
>
> Finally, i don't do lego animation myself, i am a programmer for fun. In a few
> weeks i will deliver a more mature version of Peeroml, a programming tool for
> computation with lego inventories. Peeroml is supposed to be a replacement for
> LDiff. Then i will see if a similar replacement for Lani is demanded. If it's
> not then i will consider whether fun drives me alone.
>
> Considerations,
>
> Damien
>
> lego web page: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/alphablock/
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 tool/front end for this.
An animation script which is simply an extension of LDraw, where a
meta-command tells it where the animation starts, and then (using line
numbers or some reasonable ID), only details the *changes* to the last
frame is relatively easily acheivable, crude, but acheivable. This
would be the key frames, with part of the meta-data detailing how many
steps to interpolate over.
Adding extensions to existing LDraw GUIs to create an animated drawing
script again - if these are just positioned in free space (with some
interpolation), would still be quite easy - you use existing
positioning, but taking into account the identification of parts to
get the difference could be interesting.
Someone would then create a simple library, which interpolates the
frames, and generates an "unrolled" version of the animation. A front
end command line app could be created, and the GUI's extended to use
this so they could generate "rough" animation playbacks from the
key-frames. If the library calls take streams or large string data,
then you dont necessarily need to save a file to play it back.
The library could then have functionality added to convert the Lego
script, with the help of the LDraw parts library to a POV rendering.
It would have a number of switches you could set, with sane defaults -
so a client of it could simply tell it to render out a POV file with
defaults, or set a number of state attributes first, then render. A
command line client could be created to use that library
functionality, and in the GUI's, a button in the file menu to export
the POV animation from the file added.
This shared "LDraw Animation" library (in the .dll or .o sense) would
enable many front ends to surface.
So there are a few steps here, and I am not sure I would have the time
to volunteer to create these systems myself - but its a starting
point, albeit a crude one. I would certainly appretiate it. It takes
into account some of the existing systems - and hopefully makes
minimal changes to them.
It does not cover connection databases, which allow for animation at
the real axes - but that is still a little way off. This is a solution
which could be started on fairly soon, and satisfies both the command
line people who like to open up a text editor and dive in, while
leaving room for GUI mods to accomodate it as well.
Cheers
Orion
--
http://orionrobots.co.uk - Build Robots
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: My humble opinion about LDraw animation
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| (...) 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)
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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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