[Update REQ 6847]: Making Animations with Geomview

[munzner at cs.stanford.edu]

> I have used Geomview to view movies with the animation tool. How can
> I convert that movie to another animated format (e.g. an animated
> GIF) so that I can put it on display in a web page, viewable by
> someone without Geomview?

It's true that StageManager will do this and much more too. But
there's also a very easy way to do this directly inside the Animate
module: the Command function will 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".

> P.S. Geomview is a great program.

Thanks! We always like to hear that :)

TM

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