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Create a Movie Suitable for YouTube Using Seamless3d, POV-Ray,  FFmpeg and Audacity

This tutorial shows how anyone today can make high quality 3d animated movies using free software.

Because we will be using POV-Ray to render the frames in non real time we will not only have shadows but also be able to render higher quality images than is possible directly from the video card. YouTube however will compress our movie so much that much of the quality will be lost but what is retained from the povray images will still very much be worth having.

For this tutorial you must have the following programs already installed on your computer:

• Seamless3d
• POV-Ray
• SUPER © (installs FFmpeg for us)
• Audacity if we want to record our sound track

• Create the frames for POV-Ray
• Render the frames
• Convert the png files to an avi file
• Adding a sound track
• Record a sound track

Create the frames for POV-Ray

First we need to make our animated content using Seamless3d. The simple animation created for the build avatar demo will be used as an example for this tutorial.

You can download the example file from this link: build_av.smls

Put the file build_av.smls in a new empty folder.

Open  the file build_av.smls into Seamless3d.

Select the Scene node in the scene tree:

In the Scene node's control panel check the outputPovRay field:

if a PovLight has not already been added, this causes a PovLight node to be inserted as the first node in Scene:

and causes fields specific to PovRay to be shown in the ColorEffect's control panel when the ColorEffect is selected.

The steps per second field in the Anim bar will define the number of frames per second generated for the povray movie. Set this field to 24 frames per second:

Because the period is set to 2 seconds we will generate 49 frames for the movie (24*2+1).

To output the povray files right click on the Anim node and select output povray movie:

 

When done we will get a message showing we have created the following files:

• An ini file which contains information such as the number of frames and the type of image file to create
• 49 inc files which contain the geometry and light source for the frames
• A pov file which specifies the inc frames
• A bat (batch) file containing the command line for FFmpeg

and we are prompted to open the ini file in Pov-Ray, click Yes:

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