Animating in POV

by Tim Chartier

Now, it is time to launch into animation. We will begin by looking at the following 2 files:

POV Clock

The POV clock is what will control your animation. In this code, we define a sphere: 
sphere { 0*x, 1 pigment{Yellow}
  translate x*(-2+clock*4)
}
In the code, the sphere will be translated by x*(-2+clock*4) where clock is an input parameter that is passed into the program by you!

To pass the parameter, you have to alter the command line of the POV rendering. Up to now, you have been using the default. Here is what you want to do:

  1. Click the Ini button and in the
  2. Command line options widget type:
    +kff11

    This means that you will create 11 frames (final_frame = 11)

  3. Then simply click "render"

By default, the clock value is 0.0 for the initial frame and 1.0 for the final frame. All other frames are interpolated between these values. For example if your object is supposed to rotate one full turn over the course of the animation, you could specify rotate 360*clock*y. Then as clock runs from 0.0 to 1.0, the object rotates about the y-axis from 0 to 360 degrees.

Download both move.pov and move2.pov and render the scenes as described here and in the comments in the pov file.

Creating an AVI file

Finally, your images need to be strung together to create a movie. If you are using Windows XP, then you can use Windows Movie Maker to string your bmp files together to create an avi movie.

If you are using an earlier version of Windows, download bmp2avi. It is contained at: http://www.divx-digest.tv/software/encode/Bmp2Avi.zip. Once you have downloaded the zipped document, place bmp2avi.exe into the same directory as your bmp files. Simply double click the bmp2avi icon and it will create your movie. Note, bmp2avi must be placed into the same directory as the files you want to string together. A more advanced version of bmp2avi is also available for just under $20. If you become involved in creating POV movies, you may want to look into it.

I'm not sure what to use with a Mac. If you discover what to use, let me know so this web page can be updated.

Have fun!