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[wallyrut]

I am glad to see Anim8or is again undergoing active development. I had checked out this program a while back, but it looked like it was no longer being developed or supported, so stopped using it. I am experimenting now with the latest build, and it looks good. I have been using Poser, but was never happy with Poser rendering. I found appleseed (check it out at appleseedhq.net), a really great open source renderer that is generating a lot of interest in the cg community. Appleseed does rendering, but has no facilities for modelling/animating. Exporters have been written for Blender, Maya and 3ds Max. I wrote one for Poser using Poser's Python interface and have been very pleased with my appleseed renders of Poser scenes. I have just begun working on an Anim8or to appleseed exporter. So far I have verified that I can extract camera and object position vectors and orientation quaternions from a .an8 file and convert them to 4x4 pose matricies for appleseed. I have code for exporting Poser lights to appleseed lights, so I can adapt that for Anim8or. When I get things a little farther along I will release my Python script as open source so the Anim8or community can join Blender, Maya and 3ds Max users in experimenting with appleseed.

And now a question. It looks like I can only set the camera FOV property. All the other software I have used allows me to set the aspect ratio. Usually I can set focal length and film dimensions. I know I can set render width/height in the render tab, but is there some way to do this for the camera?

Wally

[Steve]

In the Scene->Properties dialog, click on the "Movie Image" button. This will show another dialog where you can set the camera aspect ratio and move image size.

Note: when you change the Width or the Height at the top, the other value is adjusted automatically to match the Aspect Ratio. So you should change the Aspect Ratio first if it's not what you want, then set the size (or choose one of the presets).

Note 2: Anim8or only supports square pixels. This isn't what all TV and movie data formats use, but that's all there is at the moment.

[wallyrut]

Steve,

Thanks for the response. I got a preliminary version of my exporter working last weekend and have rendered some Anim8or scenes in appleseed. I note there is a scripting language for Anim8or. I've only taken a very brief look at i. Looks like it is C based. That's good for me, as I'm familiar with programming in C. My exporter is written in Python, because Poser has a Python interface. I was able to bring over a lot of code intact to use in my Anim8or project. It would be nice to be able to run my script directly out of Anim8or, instead of extracting information from the .an8 file, but I don't know if it makes sense to re-implement it in ASL. I am using Python modules to present a GUI for the user to interact with, and also to parse/write xml files, as appleseed scene files are xml.

Wally

[Hypure]

This is a pretty exciting development!  I would have spent alot more time with anim8or had there been other options. looking forward to it Wallyrut