[Paraview] Starting a batch animation in the middle -- fail

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Try the attached patch. I believe you need to set two things: the
PlaybackTimeWindow and the StartFileCount. (Seb, please correct me if
I'm wrong).
Utkarsh

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Bill Sherman <shermanw at indiana.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been successfully using pvbatch to generate animated image
> sequences of state files created with the ParaView GUI.  However,
> I am not able to begin an animation in the middle -- which I
> desperately need to do in order to parallelize my renderings.
>
> I mentioned this before in July (and again in person at SC'14),
> but haven't yet reached a solution.
>
> The documentation for the WriteAnimation() method in "simple.py"
> indicates that this is possible, but fails in two ways.
>
> 1) The WriteAnimation() method doesn't actually implement the two
> most important parameters needed: SetStartFileCount() and
> SetPlaybackTimeWindow().
>
> 2) Even doing the operation manually, SetPlaybackTimeWindow()
> affects the time of time-varying data, but does not affect the
> time of animation cues such as the cameras!  or translation
> values, etc used to move objects around.
>
> I've also experimented a lot with setting various values of the
> GetAnimationScene() -- such as: StartTime, Duration (which seems
> to have no affect whatsoever), and AnimationTime.
>
>
> I created a tar file with an example state file and batch rendering
> script:
>         http://www.freevr.org/Downloads/pvanimationtest.tar.gz
>
> The scene has three time-varying elements:
>         * Annotated Time -- works
>         * Time-varying data (meshes of digits 0-9) -- works
>         * An arrow moving through a sphere -- fails
>
> NOTE: camera moves also fail, basically in the same way as the
> arrow.
>
> So how the arrow fails is that even when I begin the animation
> process in the middle, the arrow (and any camera moves) always
> start as though it were the first frame.  By the time it gets
> to animation-time 5.0, the arrow should be through the sphere,
> but instead it appears to the left.
>
>
> To run a test, just do:
>         % pvbatch 3Drender.py
>
> This will print out some information, and may print warnings about
> bad interpolation -- these are fine because it's a result of the
> interpolating between polygonal objects (the digits) that aren't
> intended to be morphed.  The effect is sufficient that it works
> to tell me that data-time is working.
>
> Newly rendered frames go into the "Frames" directory.  There are
> other directories of the form "Frames-exN", which are various
> experiments I've run to figure out the problem.
>
> The state file that I am using is "arrowspheredatai.pvsm" (which is
> loaded in the Python script).
>
>
> This is a most desperate hour.
>
> Please help me O PV wizards, you are my only hope.
>
>         Thanks in abundance,
>         Bill
>
> --
> Bill Sherman
> Sr. Technology Advisor
> Advanced Visualization Lab
> Pervasive Technology Inst
> Indiana University
> shermanw at indiana.edu
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