I originally posted this in partial response to agloo's USS Constitution but I'm placing it here where it'll hopefully get more attention.

This is a new, tiny sea unit I'm making. All the modelling is done (using POV-Ray) and now I need to make the animations.

Any suggestions? I'm also looking for advise from all those POV-Ray users out there onto exactly how you approach the animation bit. I'm using POV-Ray 3.5, so with that in mind do you think I should animate using that program's abilities or just copy and paste from individual renders?

Anyways, here's a link to the post for those interested:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2243369&postcount=22

Hey, that looks very beautiful! Can't have enough creaters... I'm relly impressed, especially since this is your first unit. Tried pov-ray myself, coulden't really figure it out, but this gives me the desire to try again. Thumbs up for you!

This is a really awesome unit! Not only is it very well-made, but it also really seems to fit in very well with Civ3 units. I'm REALLY looking forward to its release.

I don't have any advice for animation as I don't use POV Ray... perhaps aaglo might have some to ensure this is the best it can be.

I find a lot of times that beginner unit creators have problems with palettes and such, and as a result, a perfect model can sometimes come out as a rather grainy animation... my personal experience.

Ill have to remember that...

Wow, awsome. :D

I wish I could find my thread where I made a ton of ship requests because they seem like they are all being made at once. If I get this ship (and maybe one or two more), I'm definately going to make a War of 1812 scenario.

wow, this looks really good :goodjob: nice smooth curves and lots of detail :thumbsup::thumbsup:


I find a lot of times that beginner unit creators have problems with palettes and such, and as a result, a perfect model can sometimes come out as a rather grainy animation... my personal experience.
I agree, that's why I've made a text document with links to all the threads I've helped people in need of palette help so I don't have to explain everything over and over again :)
here's the links if you need help with the palette Orthanc :)
palette - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=101120
palette - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=92755
palette - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=98491
Centering a unit- http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2154782&postcount=18

And don't forget my old pallette help thread :D
This looks great Orthanc. I know aaglo uses the POV-Ray animator, so apparently it works great. I never took time to figure it out myself, since I don't have any scenes worthy of animation :lol:

And don't forget my old pallette help thread :D

Really? I helped you with palettes? strange... I don't remember :crazyeye:
when did I help you with palettes?

A couple months ago I was trying to convert some SC4 graphics to FLC's and the pink background wouldn't go away because I had no idea how to use pallettes and was using the default GIMP pallette. You told me what pallettes do and (I think it was you) gave me a link for PEdit to make a pallette. BTW I never did get it right, I moved on to other stuff before I figured it out. :crazyeye:

Me like it! I will use it as the Dutch UU once it's released! Cool unit... :)

What It looks like you've done is copy and paste some bits and pieces from of the few models that aaglo relised. But Im probably wrong.

It looks very well done. I wish I stuck with POV-ray and got that good. Oh well. Some little hints:
Find the some of the models of aaglo's ships and copy and paste the camera location.
Look at the window size thing. (Its the drop down menu on the top left) Make sure to copy and paste what aaglo has into there.
As for animation. Simple animation is done with things like:
object translate{x*clock};
More complex things go into sins cos and other weird things.

I dont exactly know how to use pov-ray anymore. Hope this helped.

vbraun, I'm quite sure that this model has not been gathered up of the pieces from my models.

@Orthanc:
That's a fine model - I especially like very much your square sail (I think it looks better than the one I made). I would like to know how you did that sail :)
Nice details on the ship hull too. It's good to have more creators who use pov-ray :thumbsup:

About the animations:
Yes, I use the built-in animation engine of pov-ray. The help topics on the subject give you some tips about basics for the animations.

If you need help on modelling, animation, lighting, camera-angles ect. and the stuff related to pov-ray used to make civ3-units (there are some tricks to them): just go ahead and ask, I may be able to help you. :) Or if you would like to have some pov-files of my recent units, just say so :)

Wow, thanks everyone!

You're right agloo, I didn't copy and paste from your units. Since you release your units only in the CIV3-Playable fomat not the actual POV-Ray files it would be quite impossible to do so.

Anywho, thanks on the info. I was mostly asking just so that I don't get into something that others have already found to be not as effecient.

As for advice, if I get stuck I'll ask, but usually I can figure things out on my own pretty quick.

By the way agloo, all of my sails are bicubic patches, and I just changed the position of their anchor points until I got the desired shape. I assume you use bicubic patches too, since the results seem the same but I could be wrong.

Wow, thanks everyone!

You're right agloo, I didn't copy and paste from your units. Since you release your units only in the CIV3-Playable fomat not the actual POV-Ray files it would be quite impossible to do so.

That is, in fact, not true... aaglo released his POV Ray files last year... but not for many of his newer ships... but I believe you nonetheless ;)

Ok, I hit a snag.

The whole POV-Ray animation thing has got me quite puzzled. So I'll start with some of the questions I have:

First of all, when I do succesfully animate will the objects move in the render screen or will it only show the last frame of the animation or something?

Secondly, I tried following the tutorials on this but they seemed vague or incomplete, since when I followed the examples I ended up with just still images.

Finally, again when I do finally get an animation working how do I export it to a useable format, or is that done automatically?

Sorry about loading you down with all this agloo, but it's really got me frustrated and you seem to be the best person to answer this. Of course if anyone else knows how to do this feel free to drop a line.

Orthang, Aaglo released a lot of his units on this site some time ago. I have downloaded some of them, if you can't find them on this site, I can send it to you perhaps?

I guess, since you allready are quite good at povray, you can figure his files/codes out. And I'm not sure about the animation thing, but I guess you have to export it to bmp and use some tool (SSB?) - the tutorials for that can be found in tutorials I guess..

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=79551 is a link to his galleys.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=80073 aaglo said something about animations here aswell, plus a gloster gladiator file

I got some other files too, not sure where I found them

Edit: I guess I should have rather just edited my previous answer though. And I guess I could have found the other files on this site aswell, they are around somewhere. But my internet connection seems to have a bad day and I keep falling out...

Here's some stuff about animating units:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1628442&postcount=28

By default, pov-ray makes bmp-files to the same directory where the pov-file is.
Assuming that your unit name is Unit.pov, and you render 20 frames, the filenames are from Unit01.bmp to Unit20.bmp.
And as the Stephs Storyboardbuilder requires the files to start from Unit0000.bmp (where the 'Unit' can be any name you desire IIRC), I would advise you to name the file you animate as Unit00.bmp. That way you get the units named from Unit0001.bmp to Unit0020.bmp.
Then you also need the initial Unit0000.bmp-file. I'll just copy one of the frames, name it Unit0000.bmp, and copy it into each folder (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW - read SBB's readme for more details). When SBB creates the storyboard, I'll just copy all except the first 'frame-column' of the storyboard.
Confusing? I agree :)

Ask more, if you feel you need to :)

the newest version of SBB (1.06 IIRC) has a "start at 1" flag so you don't have to sart with "Unit0000"
Plus it works on any version of windows, unlike the Munit creator :)

:worship:THANK YOU!:worship:

:worship:IT WORKS!:worship:

agloo, I know you've probably been bombarded by this, but you're awesome. Not only do you make awesome units but help other people do so as well.

I think I might actually put you in some important position in one of my mods, maybe as a great leader or king or something. Maybe even a unit, like "Agloo'ic Man-O-War" or something. Actually that's sounding kinda cool, but first this unit!

Now that I got the animation down, and a few other tips for camera angles and stuff making the animations should go MUCH faster. I was previously using FLCster, which is good but by the sounds of it the SBB Storyboard is better for 'mass production'.

Expect more results soon!

You use the SBB, and then feed the result into flicster to create the flc's. :)

Looking good, btw. ;)

Well I'm finally seeing some results :thumbsup:

After running into every problem possible, I finally managed to punch out a few flics. in the (hopefully) attached zip file are the finished flics so far: run, default and fidget.

As always any suggestions would be appreciated, especially now since I am still willing to change some things.

At the moment I'm working on the attack, which will kinda double for victory animation, only in victory ALL of the guns will fire instead, not just one side.

Just a hint of caution, the preview files are in flc format, so you'll need something to view them (like FLCster or something)

Quicktime works too :)


I've got a few suggestions... first of all... I think that a forward-back rather than left-right movement would be better for the Default... and it should be subtle.

The other major problem is that the lights are facing the wrong way and that they are definitely too bright. The lights need to be shining down from the front-upper-right.

All right :)

What I find good in this unit:
- the sails are very nice :)
- the animations are looking good, but I think that the up/down movement of the ship could be a bit smaller - but that's not a big problem.

What I find not-so-good in this unit:
- lighting. It's very bright. You could try to adjust the gamma-value. Here's the lighting/camera/stuff I use.

camera {orthographic location <0,82,-124>*10 //the multiplier 10 is just there to move the camera further away
up <0,1,0> right <1,0,0> //these up & right values are used, when I render a square image
angle 62 //the bigger angle, the smaller unit
look_at <0,7,0>*10 //the same multiplier as in location
}
light_source {<5000,15000,-5000> color White }
light_source {<6000,3000,-6000> White shadowless} //to add some light without casting shadows
light_source {<-6000,3000,-6000> White shadowless}//to add more light without casting shadows
global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.9 max_trace_level 82 }
background {White}
plane {y, 1 pigment {color Magenta} finish {ambient .1 diffuse 1}}//the ambient value is there to cast some shadows


- I notice you don't use any anti-aliasign. If you do, the unit looks a lot smoother. And if you have the 'magic-pink' (a.k.a. magenta) background, the anti-aliasing works just fine in the flc-file (since you are using the suitable palette for it - with the different pink shades in the two bottom rows of the palette).

And I just want to reinforce the direction of the lighting... even with the brightness turned down, it will still look weird if the lights aren't set the same way as in Civ...

But I think aaglo's code sample ought to clear that up too...

I REALLY want to see this come out awesome... and it already looks very, very good!

This will be a sweet unit.

Not that I have much experience with making units, and this has probably been addressed by both Aaglo and Dom Pedro (both of which are very experienced in dealing with this), but I think the unit looks a little too "Sparkly" (like its decks are made of gold).

I'd like to see some waves/ripples trailing the ship in the run :)

it is a bit shiny. Sure will be a cool one for my scenario though. Think it will be done before i release my first preview next tuesday?

What's your scenario?

my sig.



its so stupid that this site has a minimum character post rule. How freeking annoying everytime i have to fill space with random characters.

Its to prevent people from having one smile answers that look something like this:

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:lol:

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the preview looks good, but it's very grainy and the animations are a little stiff... but still, pretty good for your first unit!

Again thank you for your suggestions. :thumbsup:

Okay, well I've pretty much redone the animations using the suggested lighting and such. The unit might still look goldish, but it shouldn't glitter and keep in mind I used a somewhat goldy wood texture.

Also, I decided to expand the main and bowsprit sails a bit, making the Sloop look more like a 16th century ship than a galley. I'm posting a double-sized Civilopedia pic of the Sloop here, and I'll put up a preview of the new animations very soon. I think you people are going to like the attack animation :D .

Wow. with the Schloopy almsot done. .I might have to go fix GATTM.. and make it work.

Lookin' smooth! :goodjob:

I'm awaiting it's arrival eagerly...

It's finished folks, here's the link:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=103162

I always thought Sloops came later. Were the early small ships like this called sloops also? I'm just trying to figure out how to impliment it in my scenario...

I believe that the term was widely used for pretty much any small ship, military or civilian. That means it was probably in use before Galleons, but I could be wrong.

The Civ3 privateer is a sloop. In fact, more of the Pirates' ships were sloop.

Hehe....Aaglo and Orthanc.....the way Aaglo was giving tips to you reminds me of one line between the two Sith in Star Wars Episode One:

"You will be well trained my apprenctice, they will be no match for you"

:lol:
"Join the shipwright, young Unit Makers, and together we can rule the forum!"
:lol:

"At last we will have our revenge"!