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Animation

The Geometry Center maintains a wide variety of software animation tools. Some tools, like StageManager, are geared toward producing a sequence of stills for an animation. Others, like the SGI Medis Tools suite is geared more toward converting from live video to movie files and vice versa. This page focuses mostly on the creation of frames and movie files. For information about putting animations on video tape, consult the web pages about single frame recording

Recommended for Novices

SGI's Medis Tools -- Although this suite of images/animation tools is only available on the Indy machines, it is worth the effort of finding a free machine to use them, especially if you are not very experienced. The programs in the suite all communicate with each other, and allow the user to drag and drop files. They primarily use SGI image and movie file formats, but one can produce Apple Quicktime animation files, and of course, it is always possible to convert. (see the web pages on image utilities.)
Mostly, the various Medis Tool programs are self explanatory. There are man pages, but the online documentation is more useful. The programs in the suite that pertain to animation are:
- capture -- capture takes live video either from the Indy's internal camera or from video in, and produce either stills or SGI movie files. It can also do screen captures.
- moviemaker -- moviemaker is an interactive movie editor.
- movieplayer -- movieplayer is an SGI movie file viewer. The other Medis Tool programs invoke it automatically, though it stand alone also.
- movieconvert -- movieconvert can assemble movies from images, decompose movies into images, as well as convert between several movie file formats, including Apple Quicktime.
StageManager -- StageManager is a Geomview module designed to ease the creation of mpeg movies and videotapes from geomview. It provides a uniform means of manipulating objects in geomview from a script, and then generating image files and the control files needed to make videotapes and mpeg movies from these images. It also provides a mechanism for generating GCL commands that can be read into geomview for taking real-time video off the screen.
Since StageManager is still in development, the documentation is not yet installed. However, you may still look at it. It is ~dpvc/code/tcl/StageManager.doc. You may also find notes and examples from a talk by StageManager's author Davide Cervone useful. They reside in ~dpvc/talks/SM.

Other Animation Tools

smovie -- This program takes a sequence of image files and display them as an animation. smovie is a generic SGI program, and by default displays the animation in a window on the screen, although it can generate NTSC output for videotaping as well. (For serious video taping, it is best to use the Geometry Center program heave.) For more info on smovie consult its man page.
NXMovie -- NXMovie is a port of the SGI smovie program to the NeXT. It has a graphical interface, as opposed to smovie which is primarily a command line program. On the down side, it is pretty buggy, so beware. Consult its online documentation for details.
img2mpeg and mpeg_encode -- mpeg_encode converts a sequence of image files into an MPEG animation. It is difficult to use, requiring a pattern file filed with obscure technical options. Thus, unless you have reason to deal with technicalities, you would probably be better off using the Geometry Center utility img2mpeg. This script invokes mpeg_encode with reasonable arguments, greatly simplifying the process. Typically, all you need to type is
Example: img2mpeg frame??.gif movie.mpg
For more details, consult the man page.
Maple and Mathematica -- Both Maple and Mathematica have animation capability. In both cases, there are functions which allow the user to generate a sequence of frames based on a parameter, and then view them with a built in viewer. This works very well for experimenting with mathematical animations, however the resulting image quality is somewhat low, and exporting the images is somewhat involved. One solution is to have Maple or Mathematica write out OOGL files for the frames, and then use Geomview and StageManager to to the animation. Some details:
- Mathematica -- To load the animation functions, use the command <<Graphics`Animation`. With the SGI front end, some of the relevant commands are Animate[] and ShowAnimation[]. Live and ShowEdit are also very useful for choosing view points and shading and so on. With the NeXT front end, use the animation functions from the "Graph" Menu. It is also worth noting one can save the frames as bitmaps from the "Graph" menu from either the X or the NeXT front end.
- Maple -- To load the animation functions, use the command with(plots);. Then the relevant commands are animate and animate3d.

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Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996