[Update REQ 6926]: Animation question

[munzner at cs.stanford.edu]

> I would like to save a sequence of ppm snapshot files of a single off
> object while it is rotating so that I can convert the sequence into a
> movie. The only method I know of is to rotate the object slightly with
> the mouse, stop the motion, and save each frame individually.
> 
> Is there a faster more automatic method, such as a command script. If
> so, do you have a sample command script that I could modify?

Two options:

1. If the motion is axis-aligned, it's pretty easy to use the rotate
and snapshot commands together:

(snapshot targetcam /tmp/foo%03d.rgb)
(transform world world world rotate .1 0 0)
(snapshot targetcam /tmp/foo%03d.rgb)
(transform world world world rotate .1 0 0)

and so on. The snapshot commanad auto-increments the filename. 

2. But for a more complex motion than the simple rotation around the x
axis that I have above, consider using StageManager, which was
designed to help people easily make animations from Geomview. Download
it from

http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/StageTools/

Hope this helps,
Tamara