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Subject: 
Re: My 3D Animation Diary (Was: The Minifig Macro)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.animation, lugnet.cad.ray
Date: 
Thu, 3 Mar 2005 01:35:17 GMT
Viewed: 
246 times
  
Tore,
Sorry.  Things shouldn't be that difficult.  I suppose I could have
made the Couriership demo easier (I'll have to fix the 404).  Anyway,
the minifig should be alot easier, because everything except Anton's
Library and POV-Ray is included.

Easy start instructions:

Download the minifig stuff.
Download Anton's Library.
Download POV-Ray if needed.

Method 1 (easier, but messier)
Copy everything in Anton's Library into the same folder as minifig.mac

Method 2
Edit minifig_whatever.ini and put the path to the Library folder where
it says Library=

Then, if you are using the command line povray, just select
minifig_whatever.ini render it.  I don't know if/what the Windows
POV-Ray GUI looks like, but I'm assuming you would set the Library
folder in the app somewhere (that is what the Mac GUI POV-Ray does).
Then open minifig.pov and render that.

After writing this macro, I am totally convinced that an Ldraw based
animator is way too ambitious.  Mainly because there is nobody doing
animation but a few handful of people.  I intend to use Ldraw as a
modeler from this point on, and for that I really do need it.  But to
render and animate, POV-Ray is the only way to go in my book (unless
you do the other real way and convert the Ldraw files to Blender, Maya,
Lightwave, etc.--but because of the blocky curves in Ldraw that are
transfered to those editing environments, I don't see this as a
solution that gets me enthusiastic--you would have to re-model most of
the round parts)

If you are still having trouble, email me offline and maybe I could AIM
w/ you and talk you through it.

James

On Mar 2, 2005, at 12:49 PM, Tore Eriksson wrote:

DAY 1, 20:00

Posted the following question to Lugnet.
"I have POV-Ray 3.1 and 3.5, ML-Cad, L3Lab, L3P, L3PAO, and of course
the LDraw
package on a PC with AMD1100, 256 Mb RAM and a very old video adapter.
What more
do I need to make animations like those?"
Not awaiting the reply, I assume that I need that library to begin
with. So
let's start looking...
Found a file called 511_library.zip. No explainations added. Let's
invetsigate
it...

20:15

I don't understand anything. Alright, let's try the POV-Ray Animation
Tutorial.
Found a file called demo.pov.

20:30

Had to download four other libraries. Where am I supposed to unpack
these
things? Never mind, let's put them all in the same folder. The last
one, the
Countership, turns out to be a 404. Well, well, I deleted the section
referring
to that one. More errors: color white not defined. I deleted that
parameter. And
finally it worked, but I think only one frame was rendered. No ship of
course, I
deleted that section. But no planet either. I wonder why.

- - -

After 30 minutes of frustrating trail and error, I feel that it will
take a very
long time before an animated minifig takes its first stumbling steps
in my
computer using POV libraries. I still prefer the self-contained
approach of
L3P...


/Tore




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