animation

[slevy]

In case you ever want to try using geomview for animation again, here are
some things that might help.

You can determine when a frame-refresh is complete by explicitly sending a
(draw allcams) command, then telling geomview to send a message back, and
waiting for the message to appear.  E.g. you could send the following,
*not* enclosed in a (progn ...):

    (geometry ... ) (xform-set ...)	# Load new data or transforms, etc.
    (draw allcams)
    (echo q)

Then wait for the "q" to arrive.  If the above commands were sent by a
program running as an external module, e.g. started with
   (emodule-run shellcommand)
then the "q" will appear on the shell command's standard input.

However, you may not even need to know the time of completion explicitly.
Did you know about the (snapshot CAMID filename) command?
It stores an SGI image of the given camera in the given filename, taking
care that the image is up-to-date before snapping.  So you could send a
sequence of

   (geometry ...)
   (snapshot Camera anim0000.sgi)
   (geometry ...)
   (snapshot Camera anim0001.sgi)
etc.

Also, a serious memory leak in Geomview 1.4.1 was fixed in the new 1.4.2
release, so if you grab that, things may work better in future.