[help-3dldf] ANEEMATE

[Laurence Finston]

Luís Gonçalves wrote:
-------------------
> On 5/1/05, Laurence Finston <address@hidden> wrote:

> Would
> this be alright with you, or is it not the way you want ANEEMATE to
> be used?
> 
> It's completely all right! 

Good.  I know the license allows it, but I wanted to check with you anyway.

> 
> You've heard of Blender <http://www.blender3D.org>, right?

Yeah.  I've looked at a lot of 3D packages.  I looked at the link and it seems
a bit different from what I remember.  It's a bit large and intimidating. 
It's hard to tell from just a cursory look, but it seems like it's supposed to
be used from within a GUI.  I'd pretty much decided to implement rendering
myself, if and when I get that far, but perhaps I could use Blender instead. 
Thanks for the tip.

> 
> I'm glad you mention this point because I "lost" some time learning about 
> the encoding of image sequences and now I can give you the result:

Why are some lines commented-out?  Is there a point to them?

> There is a python script where you may tune some variables:

If I can figure out how it works, I may replace it in my sources with a C
program in order to make it more portable.  The GNU Coding Standards favor C,
and I don't want to make 3DLDF depend on 
Python.

> The parameters replace the 
>  strings "ParameterA", "ParameterB", etc. (without the quotes) in the 
>   MetaPost program. 

I may be able to dispense with the parameters, since 3DLDF will be generating
my MP program, which will contain only somewhat low-level code.
 
> Is there any particular reason why you use `epstopdf'? Is it necessary > to
> convert the EPS files to PDF, or would structured PostScript suffice?

> The reason is to "canonize" the bounding box. Ghostscript (and therefore 
> ImageMagick) used to require "canonic" bounding boxes (with a corner at the 
> origin). I think this is no longer necessary. 

I don't know whether you followed the discussion about converting EPS to PS. 
If possible, I'd like to use `cnepspng'.  It seems like converting to PDF is
an unnecessary step.

> Thanks, as always, for the drive. 

My pleasure.  I think your work deserves more recognition.  Because of my
inclinations, I'm  especially interested in ANEEMATE, but some of your other
projects are also very interesting to me.  I've looked into the topic of
creating 3D graphics and animations with Free Software pretty thoroughly.  I
like your methods and I'm very impressed with your results.

I've found both the `netpbm' and the `mencoder' documentation difficult to
understand, so I really appreciate your "pre-digesting" them for me.  I might
have managed it in the end, but you've made it a lot easier.  I see my job
primarily as writing an interpreter for a Metafont-like language for 3D.  I
don't really want to get hung up too much in other issues.

Laurence