A slow day today. I decided to start work on some animation software called Argus, initially to find a way to save out consecutive frames of a scene in my 3D engine, and to set up a system that can cope with varying frame rates. None of this is ideal for practical animation, as I need to create any sprites or source objects as 3D objects wrapped with the awkward dds image format, and anything saved out has to be full-screen (so limited to formats that the monitor supports) and bmp format (huge)...
But, it has potential to be a way to automate various animation functions. The tediously animated Challenger video, which also took the best part of an hour to render in AVISynth, could be done far more quickly, and using graphics hardware acceleration. My goal is to create a sort of real-time animation system akin to moving puppets or other objects 'live' in front of the camera, but here recorded in layered tracks, like a live music performance over-dubbed several times. This would be animation, but not as we know it, and, hopefully, far less digital looking as well as faster to use.
