Attention to whom it may concern:

I have been making animations with POV for about a year and have written 
a couple of utilities to make my life easier. The MiniAnim program that I
have written is a simple utility to create a file series and move the 
camera around in simple motions. MiniAnim is a piece of crap internal
utility, I have started and almost have ready for beta testing another
animator that is more powerful (although far from really useful) and 
allows a infinite number of objects to be moved at once. Well finally 
to the heart of this letter. As I was working on my scheme to write out
the files, a friend of mine suggested using the internal animation so
as to remove the need to parse the file over and over. (I have recently
been working on an animation that takes 4 mins a frame to parse and 2 to 
render). As I have been going over the options for the internal animation
I have not been able to find any info on persistent global variables that
remain from frame to frame. I have included samples of the problems that
I have had and have given some possible solutions. I know that you guys are
very busy and do this for free. I feel that POV could very well be a viable
alternative in some cases for professional animation. Currently myself 
and a group of friends are laying out the specs to create an IP netrender
server and clients for POV. We can start that as soon as I finalize my 
output format. I could just distribute a hacked version of the POV 
binary but I would rather have full compatibility with any future 
version of POV. If I missed something in the docs and this already 
exists, please excuse this letter. I have read the POV Ray documentation 
from top to bottom.

There will be 95, NT , MacOS, and UNIX versions of these progs. All will be distributed
as freeware.



Included Files are:

INFO.TXT - This File


POVAnim.exe - Program that I am writing now - Almost in beta.
(Just deciding how to write out the files - hence this letter)

POVAnimex.pov - a sample povfile that I would use for POVANIM.
(Notice that all proprietary code has been removed)

The Anim1 directory contain a file series that I created along with
the original file (test.pov). #135 is missing because I messed
it up when entering data. Adding the ability to change key values now.


POVAnim will be absorbed into a real GUI based animator ala - Lightwave Scene Builder

If any of this has made sense to you and you would like to respond or if
it didn't make any sense and you would like to respond:

wsft@neta.com
tim@flare.emg.com

Timothy A. Grubb
WallySoft 97