[help-3dldf] (no subject)

[Laurence Finston]

Hello Nobre,

I've just spent a very pleasurable couple of hours looking through your 
FEATPOST and ANEEMATE materials.  Is `electro.mpg' new?  I don't remember
seeing it before.  It's very impressive from an artistic point of view, but I
have no idea of what the physical significance is.

I've been struggling with the problem of producing animations again.  
If I understand correctly, ANEEMATE only uses FEATPOST to create the frames,
so it ought to be possible to use GNU 3DLDF together with ANEEMATE.  Would
this be alright with you, or is it not the way you want ANEEMATE to be used?

FEATPOST can do a lot of impressive things that I'd like 3DLDF to be able to
do.  However, it doesn't seem to make sense to have 3DLDF write FEATPOST code,
since both packages do the 3D to 2D projections.  And you know better than
anyone about the arithmetical limitations of MF/MP.

I'm primarily an artist and my main interest is animation --- with 
cartoons and puppets as well as computer animation.  Obviously, I'm
neither a physicist nor a mathematician, so I'm simply not able to 
implement some of the kinds of features you've implemented.  
Certain kinds of physical phenomena are important for my work, and I'd like to
implement them, such as objects travelling along parabolic paths, motion of
objects under the influence of gravity and inertia, heads being flattened by
frying pans, etc.

You mentioned previously that the images used for making mpeg files need to be
of a certain size.  I think I've figured out how to do this using 
ImageMagick, so I'll try again to make an animation of a series of images
using one of your ANEEMATE examples as a "recipe".  

Would it be possible for you to explain what your Python and shell scripts are
doing?  It wouldn't have to be polished.

With some help, and an example from a book, I've written a JavaScript script
that creates an animation from a series of PNG files.  It works nicely, but I
think the approach you've taken with ANEEMATE is better in the long run,
especially because of the greater compression of the image files.

Is there any particular reason why you use `epstopdf'?  Is it necessary to
convert the EPS files to PDF, or would structured PostScript suffice?

Thanks, as always, for your help.

Laurence