General

Animation

Why doesn't POV-Ray open when I render from IPA?  I can run it from the Start menu.

Is it possible to distribute an animation rendering job to multiple computers to reduce the rendering time?

Why doesn't POV-Ray open when I render from IPA?  I can run it from the Start menu.

If IPA does not launch POV-Ray, the most common cause is an incorect registry entry.  Sometimes the registry settings can be corrected by uninstalling and reinstalling POV-Ray.  If not, you will need to see your system administrator for assistance. 

For example,
      C:\Program Files\POV-Ray for Windows v3.5\

Is it possible to distribute an animation rendering job to multiple computers to reduce the rendering time?

Yes. The following steps will allow you to render a series of image files on multiple computers which can in turn be merged together with an AVI editing program to create an AVI animation.

• Download savepovscenes.dll and copy to the IPA\Plugins directory
• Create an animation as normal in IPA
• Select File > Save Animation
• Select "POV Scenes" for "Save as type"
• Select "Offscreen OpenGL" for "Renderer"
• Choose Image Size as normal
• Enter a filename like "xxx.pov", and choose "save" (save to an empty folder)
• The animation will play through and generate a .ini file along with several .inc part files and a series of .pov files.
• IPA is no longer required at this point
• Copy the folder to each of the machines that you want to use for rendering
• Run POV-Ray from the Start/Programs menu
• Select File > Open and select the "xxx.ini" from the folder containing the POV files
• For each machine you must modify the .ini file to specify the Initial and Final clock and frame values. Lets look at the case in which your animation has 20 frames and you want to distribute it to two different systems to perform the rendering. On the first system you would set the Initial and Final values as follows:

  Initial_Frame = 0

  Initial_Clock = 0

  Final_Frame = 10

  Final_Clock = 10

  For the second system system you would set the following values:

  Initial_Frame = 11

  Initial_Clock = 11

  Final_Frame =20

  Final_Clock = 20

• After updating the frame range values, Hit the "Run" button on each system to start rendering
• The output from this process will be a series of Targa (tga) images (you can change the output format to bitmaps by changing the Output_File_Type value from T to S.
• You now can copy all the image files from the multiple systems back to a folder on one machine and build an AVI from the images.
• An AVI can be created from this series of images using an AVI editing package such as AVIEDIT (free program can be downloaded from http://www.am-soft.ru/setup.exe).
• Another option is to use the RAD Video Tools application to build the AVI file. The Rad Video Tools application is also free and can be downloaded via the following link: http://www.radgametools.com/down/Bink/RADTools.exe
• After downloading and installing the RAD application open the program via Start-->Programs-->Bink and Smacker-->Rad Video Tools
• Shift select the series of images that you want to merge into an AVI file
• Select the "List Files" button
• Answer "Yes" to the "Treat as Sequence" question
• Select the 2nd line in the list file contents box and then hit the "Remove" button
• Select the "Save As" button and save with a name such as "Video.lst"
• Select the "Close" button
• Highlight the "Video.lst" file
• Select the "Convert a File" option
• Set the frame rate (fps) in the "Force (no adding or removing) to:" box
• Select the "Convert" button
• Choose the "Compressor" (Full frames uncompressed for highest quality"
• The AVI file should be created
• Try running the AVI file through the Bink tool to achieve incredible compression ratios without impacting the quality:
  • Select the AVI file and choose the "Bink It" option
  • Accept the default values and hit the "Bink" button
  • This will create a .bnk file. You can also convert this to an exe file.