Animation Recording Options

The Animation Recording Options window provides options that determine the size and frames per second for the animation being produced and whether it should be anti-aliased or not.

Animation Size

A number of recording sizes ranging from 160x120 to 1600x1200 are available. Keep in mind while setting this option that many computers will not be able to smoothly play videos above 640x480. Also, larger sizes result in larger files.

Custom sizes are also available by selection "Custom" and entering a desired Width and Height.

Frames per Second

You may choose the number of frames per second that should be recorded. Note that this is the number of images per second not the number of animation key-frames per second. Animations tend to look very smooth at around 30 frames per second. 15 frames per second is recommended in order to reduce file size.

Anti-Alias (Available with 3D Canvas Pro)

Anti-Aliasing produces smoother images, at the expense of much slower rendering times.

If you do not have 3D Canvas Pro, you can get anti-aliased videos by rendering in a size larger than you need and then using a Video Editing Program to scale the video to a smaller size.

Raytrace using POV-Ray (Available with 3D Canvas Pro)

This option will be available if you have 3D Canvas Pro and POV-Ray installed on your system. If you select this item, 3D Canvas will use POV-Ray to render your scene rather than Direct3D.

POV-Ray is a Raytracing rendering engine that is available for free at www.povray.org. Rendering with POV-Ray is much slower than with Direct3D, however it produces more dynamic images with true shadows and reflections. Note that the lighting scheme for POV-Ray is slightly different than Direct3D so you may find that the final image produced by POV-Ray is somewhat darker, or brighter than the Direct3D produced image. Also, textures are not rendered unless you have the MegaPOV version of POV-Ray which is available at ftp.povray.org. There are also differences in interpretation of materials that may make your objects look somewhat different.

Save Animation as Images (Available with 3D Canvas Pro)

This option allow you to save animation images to a sequence of Windows bitmap files. e.g. Animation1.BMP, Animation2.BMP, Animation3.BMP etc.