[Update REQ 6855]: StageStills

[munzner at cs.stanford.edu]

> I need to make many gif files of a sequence of geomview obsects. 
> I am presently feending them to the pipe opened by togeomview and I am
> using the menu driven StageStills (or StageManager for movies). This
> is a pain :-(
> Is there a way to give a gcl command so that geomview will do it
> automatically?

It's true that the menu-driven StageManager will do this, and a lot
more. But if you're only loading up a bunch of objects and taking a
snapshot from the same vantage point every time you could just use the
Animate module and its Command button, which lets you run an arbitrary
GCL command after each frame. So to automatically take snapshots at
each frame, you'd hit the Command button and type something like

(snapshot c0 /tmp/foo%03d.rgb)

into the text field. Then when you hit play you'll see that it's now
jerky since it's saving an image off to disk each time. You might want
to turn on the "Once" radio button so that it stops after running
through each frame once. Then you can use your program of choice to
create an animated gif or quicktime movie from this bunch of image
files. For instance, on the SGIs you could do this with
"mediaconvert".

You can have the Animator read a text file full of object names in the
order you want, or if it can just be encoded in a simple object name
template like foo*.rgb you can just type that in to the text field.

Does this solve your problem? 

> (emodule-start    NAME) 
> (emodule-transmit NAME LIST) 
> 
> What should e.g. be NAME amd what LIST?

Well, the emodule-transmit command only works if a module is written
so that it accepts GCL. Most modules don't do this, I only know of a
few quite specialized ones do, and I don't think StageManager is one
of them. But the author of StageManager is Davide Cervone, and I don't
think he's on this list. You could ask him directly at the address
dpvc at union.edu.

Hope this helps,
Tamara

 ---
Tamara Munzner	munzner at cs.stanford.edu
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/~munzner