[Radiance-general] ranimate

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Mark de la Fuente wrote:

> I have a building where I would like to make an animation of the sun
> moving across the space.  It seems that if you have a static scene and a
> dynamic view, then you use the OCTREE (say OCTREE= scene.oct) variable
> in the ranfile while the view variable and file contains all the
> different views (one per frame).  However in my case I would have a
> static view and a dynamic octree.

Hi Mark,

I have no experience with ranimate or ranimove, so I can't say for 
certain that there's no way to do that with those tools.  However, There 
*is* a way to animate your sun, simply using rpict and some shell 
scripting.  John Mardaljevic's script in "Rendering with Radiance" is a 
prime example. The basic idea is that you set up a for-each loop for 
each timeslice you want to render.  John's script plugs the variable 
into the time parameter for gensky.  Alternately you could feed the 
variable to sed to directly modify a sky.rad file.  That way, you could 
use rad to produce the renderings.

Also, if you're primarily concerned with seeing the movement of the sun 
patch, a neat trick (again John M's idea) is to render the stills with 
-ab 0 and assign some decent -av so that you can at least see the rest 
of the space.  By eliminating the ambient calculation, your stills will 
render ultra-quickly; you can be watching the sun path in minutes, 
rather than hours.  As Martha Stewart used to say, that's a Good Thing. 
  (These days, she says "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and 
nothing but the truth.")  =8-)

----

      Rob Guglielmetti

e. rpg@rumblestrip.org
w. www.rumblestrip.org