Make movies with povray

[patmarion]

VTK has an exporter for povray. It actually works. With a little TLC this might be useful for making flashier movies.

[rdeits]

This is super exciting! Having to play my trajectories back at 1 fps or lower to render movies in Director was getting annoying ;-)

[patmarion]

A few test renders-

http://people.csail.mit.edu/patmarion/software/director/media/movies/

[wxmerkt]

Hi Pat, Any idea on when this feature might land? I've seen your branch (https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/director/compare/master...patmarion:add-povray-exporter) and wondered where and how we can help with TLC to get it into master. We're facing the issue of having to play back at 1-fps as well. Cheers, Wolf

[patmarion]

i don't have any plans to continue developing this branch in the near term, but I'd be happy to merge it into master after just a little clean up. It's basically in a working state, except I'm sure I broke a couple things when I rebased it.

I can make the code in moveexporter.py general purpose and move all the custom code into an example script. There are also some pov-ray files required that are not in this branch but I have them in my dropbox.

Maybe we can schedule a time to talk on gchat while we try to get it working on your machine, then you can take it from there?

[wxmerkt]

Sounds great - any time after Thursday is good, perhaps early next week?

Edit: Have you found another way in the meantime to increase FPS when rendering? We are not looking for flashiness and shadows but rendering/playback speed - thanks!