>> >I've been playing around with learning blender, with the idea of >> >animating some 4-D projection/rotations of polytopes into 3D. But all >> >I really want is a nice compressed animation/movie format, and it >> >seems like there should be a lighter-weight way to do that. If I come >> >up with anything worth sharing I will submit it. >> >> There are 3 french professors who have done an amazing job at >> 4D polytope projections. See: >> >> <http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_regarder_E_E.htm> > >That's a great movie - and since it was made in my lab I have some info >relevant to the discussion. They use povray to generate all the images, >and the animation is done within povray (you can set loops and such) ; >povray as such doesn't have too many primitives, so most of the fancy >knots and such are actually strings of spheres, and the path is >precomputed. The main advantage of povray is that it looks gorgeous ... >The main disadvantage is that it takes ages to compute (well, in the >order of a few minutes per frame). > >So, to return to Sage : it should be quite doable to have one plot3d >format be povray source-code, to be compiled separately (or which gets >compiled in the background). That's not at all real-time, so I'm not >sure it fits the original purpose, but it certainly can produce a movie >(in .avi or whatever format) in the end.
It would seem that ray tracing should be a fully parallel task. I don't know if povray does this but given the upcoming multicore machines this kind of technology might be closer to real time than before. Do you know if povray can use multicore? Tim --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
