ANIM8 Animator

FREE Registration for ANIM8.

Version 1 changes:

• 1.4 (6/29/96) - Added user defined programs to Render menu.
• 1.3 (6/11/96) - Enhanced documentation (easeto and easefrom added!) and added a hypertext help system.
• 1.2 (1/26/96) - Fixed bug in rotate keys that caused rotate and look at problems. Special thanks to Lois Danks for providing a sample animation that revealed this problem.
• 1.1 (1/05/96) - Parser no longer forces input to lower case. This fixes the problem with POVRAY's case sensitive texture names. Now allows mixed case input of raytracer arguments.

ANIM8 is a powerful animation environment that allows PC animation hobbyists to build a sophisticated animation system from a variety of components. With ANIM8, you can do your rendering with POVRAY, VIVID, or other readily available raytracers and set up your own choice of image viewer, text editor, animation builder and player.

ANIM8's Graphical User Interface lets you create and edit keyframe data quickly and easily. Design complex three dimensional spline curve paths on screen and even preview animated motion in real time! Then edit, render, build and play directly from ANIM8's control panel.

ANIM8 Features:

• Hypertext help viewer
• Ortho views: Front, Right, and Top with pan and zoom
• Perspective view with pan, zoom, and angle control
• Camera view from camera object
• Camera objects can move, roll, zoom, and track other objects
• Link objects with configurable link types
• Hide/Show objects, paths, grids and links
• Create three dimensional spline paths with easy editing
• Assign any object to any path
• Optional path offset by object for following objects
• Set number of frames along path by object
• Path editing - drag, resize, rotate, flip x, y, or z
• Constrain path edits by axis
• Real time animation motion preview
• Modifiable preview play speed
• Step through frames, set highest frame number
• Assign keys to frame
• Keys can be any vector or scalar values used by raytracer
• Easeto and Easefrom control for natural looking motion
• Absolute and relative keys
• Edit, move, copy and delete keys
• Shift whole groups of keys in a single action
• Use macros to configure command line or source options
• Edit, build, and play directly from ANIM8
• Configure multiple rendering setting
• External command verification for debugging configuration
• Message bar provides on-line instructions
• Free memory display

ANIM8 Screen Shot

To use ANIM8, you will need a text-based renderer such as POVRAY and an animation builder such as DTA. Those new to computer animation should visit Wire Frame University and attend the classes on 3D art and animation before you attempt to use ANIM8.

Download ANIM8 (292 K). Note: This file requires PKUNZIP to decompress.

Current users can download just the new hypertext help system here. (47K)  

ANIM8 Utilities

• AU_RENAM.ZIP (9K) lets you create a series of raytracer source files from ANIM8. Great for porting animation sequences to high powered non-PC computers.

POVTICK

These POV keywords are recognized by PT2.0 and can be assigned as keyframe attributes for animation: rotate, translate, scale, rgb, location, direction, sky, up, right, look_at, ambient, diffuse, brilliance, phong, phong_size.

Download POVTICK (40 K). Note: This is a .ZIP file that requires PKUNZIP to decompress.

FREE Registration for POVTICK.

Here's a tip concerning running POVTICK under Win95:

From: "J.A. Bijsterbosch" 
To: "Mark Willis" 
Subject: Re: povtick registration, readme.txt suggestion
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 12:17:23 +0200
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

Hello Mark,

on saturday april 5, 1997 14:25 you wrote:
> 
> INSTRUCTIONS FOR REGISTERING POVTICK:
[ snip ]

First of all, thanks for your prompt reaction on my registration request.
However, since I use a Win95 version of povray it wasn't that simple to
make povtick perform the way described in the included readme, pvt and pov
files. One solution is of course to install the dos version, but it can be
done with the W95 version as well as I found out. It involves some
fiddling, but no real changes have to be made to the setup of either
program.

First, start povray and make shure that the options 'keep one instance' and
'Quit on completion' are checked. Also make shure you have opened a file in
the directory containig povtick where the $$$0000.pov file will be made.
Furthermore set render options in povray as desired for the animation.

Second, open a Windows dosbox and go to the directory where povtick
resides. Now comes a tricky part, since I use a Dutch version of windows,
in the properties of the dosbox one must set the 'suspend in background'
option so windows semi multitasking for that dosbox is switched off. (
Otherwise povtick will launch new $$$0000.pov files while povray is still
rendering the first one ) Now launch the desired pvt file as described.

Two further points of interest. 
One, since this trick depends on the fact that, when in the backround,
povtick will wait while povray renders a frame and closes itself to become
the active application again, no other windows tasks can be done during
this animation process.

Two, in the command directive in the pvt file, only the path and name of
the pov engine will be sufficient to run the rendering as described above.

Feel free to use the above hints as you see fit, and my compliments with
the interesting concept of povtick.

Greetings from sunny Amsterdam,
    
     Jan Bijsterbosch

This page was selected as a "Key Resource" page for the Raytracing topic July 2000.

Links2Go Key Resource Ray Tracing Topic