Sceda: Scene Editor/Animator


Overview
--------

  Sceda is a patched version of sced, the cool three dimensional
modeller from Stephen Chenney (schenney@franklin.cs.berkeley.edu).
Sceda supports simple keyframe/spline based animation of scenes,
including wireframe animation from within sceda and exporting
animation sequences for rendering.


Description
-----------

  Sceda is, like sced, an X-based, constraint-oriented three
dimensional modeller.  It also provides support for splined keyframe
animation.  Animated objects have their position, rotation and scale
smoothly interpolated across multiple keyframes via a (modified)
spline function.

  It naturally requires X, and a sufficiently Unix-like environment.
I develop on a Linux system, so I know it works there, but most other
platforms should also work, modulo messed up keysyms.  This version
of sceda is based on sced 0.81.

  This software is beta: it mostly works pretty well, but there are
still bugs to be found.  If you try it out and something breaks,
drop me a line.

  Currently, this version of sceda allows you to:

  - Create and design single scenes, the same as in vanilla sced.

  - Clone or copy a single scene to create multiple scenes.  These
    multiple scenes are used as keyframes for animating

  - View and edit each keyframe individually.

  - Control the number of interpolated frames between each keyframe
    pair in various ways.

  - Perform wireframe animations from within sced, in which the position, 
    rotation and scaling of the objects, the position and orientation of 
    the camera in the keyframes, and the zoom factor are smoothly 
    interpolated across the frames.

  - Export scene description files for all frames (keyframe and inter-
    polated) to the usual sced array of formats (POVray, Renderman, 
    Radiance, etc).  A script file, for performing all the renders, is
    also exported.

  - Save and load keyframe sequences from files.

  - Propagate views, objects, and attributes of objects across keyframes.

  - Clone sets of objects within and across keyframes.

  - Delete sets of objects across keyframes.

  - Use various keyboard shortcuts for things like editing, zooming, 
    view recall and viewpoint manipulation.


Availability
------------

  Sced is distributed under the GNU copyleft, and so are the patches 
to get from sced to sceda.  Sceda is available via the sceda home 
page at:

http://www.cyberus.ca/~denism/sceda/sceda.html


  Vanilla sced source is available via anonymous ftp from:

ftp://ftp.cs.su.oz.au:/stephen/sced

  or from the sced home page:

http://www.cs.su.oz.au/~stephen/sced.html


Feedback
--------

  I'm interested in feedback from anyone who uses this, including bug
reports.  I'm also very interested in seeing any animations you do with
it: if you come up with something particularly nifty, please let me 
know about it.  I can be reached at the email address below.


Denis McLaughlin
denism@cyberus.ca
October 21, 1995