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classes for generating animations with Sage mathematics system
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A framework for animations with Sage AUTHORS ------- * Niles Johnson (2013) <http://www.nilesjohnson.net> LICENSE: GPLv3 ------- This file is part of a program for creating animations with the Sage mathematics system <http://sagemath.org>. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. OVERVIEW --------- An outline of this framework. The classes defined in sage_animate are a framework for 3D animation. They aim to support an animator throughout the development process. There are surely many ways to do this, and the strategy we've chosen may or may not be most natural. The overriding principle is to build flexibility into the framework by making it more modular. We assume that the animator begins by "storyboarding" -- writing the code which will produce key still frames for the animation. This should probably be done with the Scene or Frame classes, developing functionality to produce a range of images for the animation. The next stage, we assume, is "rough cutting" -- designing several animation sequences which will be appended to make the full animation. Each of these sequences could be a separate Segment object: a parametrized sequence of Frames determined by a function on some interval. Next the sequences can be assembled into a Timeline object. This is where the animator can control render parameters such as frame rate, resolution, and file names. Timing details are provided to aid in synchronizing with prerecorded audio. Test rendering can be done with the render_segment functions, optionally using the "step_size" keyword to render every kth frame for some k > 1. After the frames are rendered, use a tool such as ffmpeg to combine them into an animation. Currently the Timeline class doesn't provide an interface to ffmpeg, so you have to run those commands separately. An example command is given below. USAGE ------ An outline / suggested workflow. See demo.sage for a demonstration of this workflow. * Begin by designing Frame and Scene classes which draw still scenes for (a segment of) your animation. They should be able to produce a variety of still images with different camera angles, different objects, different text annotations, etcetera, as appropriate for your animation. At minimum, the Scene object should be able to produce storyboard stills for this segment of the animation. The Scene class is for defining: - Functions which produce objects for the Scene - Functions which determine where to place objects, camera, light sources, etc. The Frame class is for: - Setting Scene class and its inputs - Rendering test images during development One goal should be that Frame objects are small and fast, deferring time- and memory-intensive calculations to Scene objects. The Sequence and Timeline classes mainly work with Frame objects to keep development functions fast. * Next, design functions which will generate a sequence of frames as a function of time. Use these to build animation Segments, and join the Segments into a Timeline object. The Sequence class is for defining: - Functions to produce Frames (and Scenes) The Timeline class is for: - Setting graphical attributes of the whole animation (resolution, frame rate, file naming conventions, etc.) - Setting segment options (if necessary) - Rendering many Frames * Finally, combine the rendered images into an animation with something like ffmpeg. ffmpeg is a complex and full-featured tool, with somewhat sparse documentation. Here is one example using it to generate an animation from a sequence of png images and an mp3 audio file: ffmpeg -y -r 30 -vcodec png -i /path/to/animation-frame%08d.png -i /path/to/audio.mp3 -t 00:02:54.3 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -threads 0 -tune animation animation-out.mp4 For details on ffmpeg, you could start with these two: - http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html - http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/x264EncodingGuide MORE INFORMATION ------------------ Details of some design decisions. *Segments and Timelines* When an animation grows to thousands of frames, development can become cumbersome and slow. The Segment class aims to alleviate this by allowing the animator to work with smaller pieces during development. However this leads to a difficulty with settings that should be uniform for the entire animation (e.g. resolution or file format). The Timeline class is intended to manage these at an animation-wide level, but it needs to pass them to individual frames for rendering. We wanted to do this without storing frames, so we designed Frame objects to check whether they are part of an ambient Timeline object or not. This is controlled by the _timeline attribute of a Segment object. It is set to None by default, and set to the containing Timeline object when a segment is appended to a timeline. When frames are generated by a segment object, it checks the value of this _timeline attribute to see if there are animation-wide settings to apply. *Scenes and Frames* A natural starting point for 3D images is to write a function which produces an image according to various input parameters (position, color, opacity, etc.). As the range of desired outputs becomes more complex, the input parameters grow more complex. A next step in organization might be to take inputs from a dictionary, with the dictionary produced by a helper function. The Scene/Frame paradigm follows essentially the same structure, where a Scene is a generalized function for producing images, and a Frame is a generalized container for input parameters.
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