Re: [O] [OT] Generate animations (programmatic)

[adam]

On Tue, 2012-06-19 at 12:05 +0900, Torsten Wagner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> its a bit OT (well maybe there is a babel solution ;) )
> I am looking for a way to generate small animations for educational
> purpose. I know many here did/do/plan to do similar things, thus I
> would like to ask here.
> 
> Those animations need to follow some underlying algorithms (I would
> need a correct physical, chemical, biological behavior).
> I'm not an art person (so please don't tell me to get pen and paper)
> and do not have the time (well the animations should help me but they
> are not my daytime job) to spend hours or even weeks in getting
> Blender and Co creating (superb) animations.
> 
> Thus I am looking for:
> 
> * Possibly a programmatic way to create animations
> * Something with a good balance of effort vs. output
> * Possibility to either inject results from other programs (scilab,
> python, matlab, etc.) or to include the necessary behavioral model
> * The output should be readable on many different platforms (Linux,
> Mac, Windows, Android, IOS, etc)
> * An open and well described output format
> * An open and well described workflow
> 
> Well, the last two points are important to me, since I might use the
> animations for longer time (course material) and I would like to have
> a chance to open and modify them even in 3, 5  or even 10 years.
> 
> My ideas so far
> 
> * Processing language (seems interesting and fast to get results,
> however, not really an open output format, can't see the future of it
> clearly)
> * ProcessingJS (this solves the problem of having a easy to read
> output format, other problems are still the same)
> * Adobe flash (violates several of the above requirements, plugins on
> different platforms are a mess)
> * SVG + HTML5 (this looks promising as many web-browser would be
> capable to open it without plugin, but I can't find a programmatic
> easy way to start with this, any authoring tools, libs or APIs?)
> * TIKz + animation (I use Tikz already and really like it. Never used
> the animation package. However, animated PDFs are only readable with
> the Adobe Reader)
> * Python (well Python as a general language might work nice, however,
> which package could be used for animation? I used once pygames but
> this seems to be graphically disadvantaged)
> * Inkscape (there are modules to do animation, but how to get my
> behavior model into it?)
> * Blender, Gimp (steep learning curve, many many ours of work to get
> an animation)
> * Synfig, Pencil, ktoon, etc (maybe faster results compared to
> Blender, but again, how to get my behavior model into it?)
> * Powerpoint, Libreoffice Presenter (well, as soon as it comes to a
> bit more complex animations this becomes fast a nightmare)
> 
> Ideally, I would love to see something like TikZ with a good way to
> add animations and to finally generate a SVG-based animation readable
> by almost all webbrowsers.
> This embedded in a language which allows me to perform the behavioral
> modeling too and I would be quite happy already.
> 
> I would be glad if some of you could share there ways, ideas and
> workflows to do this kind of animations.
> 
> All the best
> 
> Torsten
> 

Is POV-Ray out of the question? 

- command-line driven
- outputs many graphic types
- very programmable
- can (be programmed to) read and parse intermediary text/data files  
- robust
- render to animation later with ffmpeg or mencoder