On Tue, 2012-06-19 at 12:05 +0900, Torsten Wagner wrote: > Hi, > > its a bit OT (well maybe there is a babel solution ;) ) > I am looking for a way to generate small animations for educational > purpose. I know many here did/do/plan to do similar things, thus I > would like to ask here. > > Those animations need to follow some underlying algorithms (I would > need a correct physical, chemical, biological behavior). > I'm not an art person (so please don't tell me to get pen and paper) > and do not have the time (well the animations should help me but they > are not my daytime job) to spend hours or even weeks in getting > Blender and Co creating (superb) animations. > > Thus I am looking for: > > * Possibly a programmatic way to create animations > * Something with a good balance of effort vs. output > * Possibility to either inject results from other programs (scilab, > python, matlab, etc.) or to include the necessary behavioral model > * The output should be readable on many different platforms (Linux, > Mac, Windows, Android, IOS, etc) > * An open and well described output format > * An open and well described workflow > > Well, the last two points are important to me, since I might use the > animations for longer time (course material) and I would like to have > a chance to open and modify them even in 3, 5 or even 10 years. > > My ideas so far > > * Processing language (seems interesting and fast to get results, > however, not really an open output format, can't see the future of it > clearly) > * ProcessingJS (this solves the problem of having a easy to read > output format, other problems are still the same) > * Adobe flash (violates several of the above requirements, plugins on > different platforms are a mess) > * SVG + HTML5 (this looks promising as many web-browser would be > capable to open it without plugin, but I can't find a programmatic > easy way to start with this, any authoring tools, libs or APIs?) > * TIKz + animation (I use Tikz already and really like it. Never used > the animation package. However, animated PDFs are only readable with > the Adobe Reader) > * Python (well Python as a general language might work nice, however, > which package could be used for animation? I used once pygames but > this seems to be graphically disadvantaged) > * Inkscape (there are modules to do animation, but how to get my > behavior model into it?) > * Blender, Gimp (steep learning curve, many many ours of work to get > an animation) > * Synfig, Pencil, ktoon, etc (maybe faster results compared to > Blender, but again, how to get my behavior model into it?) > * Powerpoint, Libreoffice Presenter (well, as soon as it comes to a > bit more complex animations this becomes fast a nightmare) > > Ideally, I would love to see something like TikZ with a good way to > add animations and to finally generate a SVG-based animation readable > by almost all webbrowsers. > This embedded in a language which allows me to perform the behavioral > modeling too and I would be quite happy already. > > I would be glad if some of you could share there ways, ideas and > workflows to do this kind of animations. > > All the best > > Torsten >
Is POV-Ray out of the question? - command-line driven - outputs many graphic types - very programmable - can (be programmed to) read and parse intermediary text/data files - robust - render to animation later with ffmpeg or mencoder
