Introduction
Requirements
In order to use the AnimMate graphical user interface for MGED, you will
need access to BRL-CAD Release 5.0 (or above). In addition, this
tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the UNIX operating system
and with MGED, BRL-CAD's multi-device geometry editor.
Scope of this tutorial
Creating animations with BRL-CAD involves several steps, including:
- Determining key parameters
- Interpolating between key parameters
- Creating animation scripts
- Computing frames
- Post-processing (e.g. recording frames on videotape)
This tutorial shows you how to use AnimMate
in the first three steps of the animation process. The appendix
briefly explains how to use the BRL-CAD raytracer to generate the images
specified in the animation scripts you create.
To learn more about the last two steps of the animation process, or for
more detailed information about how the animation scripts work,
you should consult
Animation Techniques in
BRL-CAD by Lee A. Butler and Christine Murdza.
Setup
The first few sections of the tutorial will use the moss-world geometry
database, which is included with the BRL-CAD distribution. If the
BRL-CAD source is located in the "/cadsrc" directory, then you should
put a copy of the moss-world file into your working directory, and then open
the database with MGED:
%> asc2g < /cadsrc/db/moss.asc > moss.g
%> mged moss.g
Now, within the MGED interaction window, the following command
will call up AnimMate's main menu.
mged> animmate
When the
main menu
is posted, you are ready to begin animating.
Next Section: Object Animation
Index