[Radiance-general] A question about Animations, and about the Book that will solve all my troubles...

[Jeffrey McGrew]

Hello all,

    I've been learning Radiance over the last year or so, primarily 
running it within Cygwin, rendering models exported from Revit or 
generated by hand.

    Now that I've gotten to where I can produce OK renderings (need to 
learn more complex materials), I would like to try making a simple 
animation to learn how. From reading the wonderful post I found in the 
archive from Greg Ward about making animation paths, I'm almost there, 
however I'm missing something and getting an error because of it.

    I've generated the key.vf file with multiple viewpoints set for my 
animation path, along with a -t following each one for the amount of 
time I want between each point along the path. I've generated the 
key.fmt file. However, when I run the command to extract the information 
from my key.vf into a form that can be manipulated to make the full 
path, all I get in the key.cal file is:

Px(x):select(1,);
Py(x):select(1,);
Pz(x):select(1,);
Dx(x):select(1,);
Dy(x):select(1,);
Dz(x):select(1,);
H(x):select(1,);
V(x):select(1,);
T(x):select(1,);

Now, it seems like this is wrong, for when I try the next step, which is 
to then use this key.cal along with spline.cal to generate my desired 
animation path, it exits with an 'unexpected character' as soon as it 
reaches that blank value after the '1,' it even points at the space in 
the error. And then my desired path file is created, but blank.

So I'm at a loss, as I've tried this several times, and I know I'm 
typing everything verbatim from the example in the post. Is this 
something that's a problem because of Cygwin? Some grammar thing? I 
haven't had a chance to test it on Linux yet.

So if anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be terribly 
appreciative. Also, I'd love to know if the 'Rendering with Radiance' 
book is going to be out/available anytime soon, for then it would 
greatly lessen my nagging questions to all of you. :-)

Thanks in advance,

Jeffrey McGrew