thx veb
made another one, that tekken move:

http://www.toribash.com/tekken.avi

I'm really interested in the pov animation - I installed povray, and loaded the animation, but just get a single bmp of a blue background.

I got the .pov, then openned it in povray - fresh install, clicked run - am I suppossed to look for a specific render animation option? cause it attempts to make a bmp

hm i've gotten this sometimes too, dont know how i fixed it really.. one thing of importance is that the .inc files should be in the same directory as the animation. oh, and make sure that you dont press render when viewing the .inc screen, that causes this also.

Doesn't this happen when you have the .inc file selected when you click render instead of the screenshot.pov file?

I know the answer!! *warm fuzzy feeling*

there are two ways to generate an animation in POV-Ray (both will have multiple bmps to stitch together). It depends on what file you are trying to render.

screenshot.pov
this is the classic way, and takes a while, take a screen shot [F8] and render it, move one frame, take another screen shot [F8] and render that. Very slow and tedius. The blue screen should not occur with this.

animation.pov
this is a new way to generate animations (thank-you very much hampa!). Toribash will create this file which contains all the frames. To get this to render (and not a blue screen) you need to specify what frames you want rendering.

Find the correct box:
I hate creating images, so I will describe it! At the top is the file menu [file, edit, search, ...] underneath that are some buttons [new, open, save, ...]. Underneath that is what we want! There should be a drop down box with resolutions, next to that should be an empty box - this is the box you want!

Specify your frames
Enter the following into that box:

Initial_Frame=X Final_Frame=Y

Now, look through the code, you should see lines that look like this: #case (?Z?) where ?Z? is a number. For X, inset the number in the first one of these lines (near the top). For Y, put in the last one (at the bottom).

All done!
When you click render, it will render each frame, calling it animation?Z?.bmp Then you just need a program to put them all together.

Hope that helps!

slainveteran - that worked perfectly!

specified frames and now it's rendering ;)

at work VNC'd to my home pc watching it slowly render each frame - dont know what's slower - the rendering, or mt vnc connection... still thanks to you all for the quick replies.


side question - is povray single threaded? or is multithreading another option I have to enable?

edit -http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/160/
nvm

hmm, maybe I can run 2 with first half and last half of the anims...

singe threaded unfortunately.

I always use a small resolution without antialiasing when creating videos. Compression will remove all benefits of rendering AA anyway ;)

I throught the latest version of POV-Ray was multi-threaded?

EDIT: Looks like multi-processor support is in beta

"Our beta page has available a beta-test version of POV-Ray for the Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms. The most significant change from the end-user point of view between versions 3.6 and 3.7 is the addition of SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support, which in a nutshell allows the renderer to run on as many CPU's as you have installed on your computer. This will be particularly useful for those users who intend purchasing a dual-core CPU or who already have a two (or more) processor machine. On a two-CPU system the rendering speed in some scenes almost doubles."

Here's another way to generate a camera-sweeping animation, don't know if this is any easier.

Modify glossy.inc (or whichever one you're using) so the camera definition at the top has a rotate definition, thus

#macro Camera( xpos, ypos, zpos, lookatx, lookaty, lookatz)
camera {
    location <xpos,-ypos, zpos>
    sky <0, 0, 1>
    look_at <lookatx, -lookaty, lookatz>
    rotate  <0,0,-360*(clock)>
}
light_source { <xpos, -ypos, 3> rgb <1,1,1> }
#end

Then put the INI file in the raytrace folder then open the INI in POVray, it'll render a 30-frame sweeping camera animation as a series of BMPs. You can change the values in the INI to have more frames, and mess around with putting the "clock" variable in different places for various camera sweeps.

Hey guys, really good manual you posted, its working but not completly,

the programm is rendering each frame , thats good, but when i open the
.bmp's they are all the same, just 2 Player standing arround, nothing happends,

i did this with that "Initial_Frame=X Final_Frame=Y"

and its correct, 100%, but in some way, the .bmp's look all same =(


When i open the toribash0001.bmp and the toribash0050.bmp, they are the same o0, i cant see any animation in it, just the rendered players from toribash standing to each other, not moving.

Is this normal??
My Animation got 1100 Frames.

EDIT: ITS WORKING NOW!! THX GUYS =)