4.5.2.5 Animation Pane

This pane lets the user set up initial, final, and number of frames for doing multiple frame animations. This sets up POV-Ray to do multiple images, each time sending a slightly different "+K" value to the POV-Ray engine. You need to turn on the checkbox "Turn on clock Animation" to make animation take effect.

4.5.2.5.1 Frame Number

This is just a reference number which counts the number of frames (or images) to generate. It starts at one, and increments for each frame. This number is not accessable inside your scene files, it is simply an external counter of image frames. The overall span of frames for an animation goes from INITIAL to FINAL. The actual frames that will be rendered from that will be a subset, from START AT to END AT:

Initial - This is a constant low bound for the frame counter. It is always one.

Start At - This is the first frame number to start generating images for. It can be any integer number from "Initial" to "End at". You might want to set this to something higher than "Initial" if you want to render some subset of overall animation frames (e.g., you have several machines simultaneously rendering different parts of the animation sequence.)

End At - This is the last frame number to generate images for. It can be any integer number from "Start at"to "Final".

Final - This is the high bound for the frame counter. It is the total number of frames that should be generated for the scene. This is used to calculate the span of clock values.

4.5.2.5.2 Clock Value

This is a variable passed into POV-Ray, which can be used as a dynamically changing animation variable (clock) in a scene file (the "+Knn" parameter.)

Initial - This is the clock value at frame #1. It must be different than the "Final" clock value, but otherwise may be any floating point value.

Start At - This is the displayed clock value at the "Start At" frame value.

End At - This is the displayed clock value at the "End At" frame value.

Final - This is the clock value at the "Final" frame #. It must be different than the "Initial" clock value, but otherwise may be any floating point value, higher or lower than Initial.

4.5.2.5.3 Field Rendering

Activate this option for rendering only the specified scanlines of an image. This is useful for animations on interlaced display, e.g. TVs. The radiobuttons let you choose which scanline to start on.