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

[Bill Sherman]

Utkarsh, Sebastien,

> Forgot the patch..attached.

Okay yes, that patch works!  Thank you.  I would perhaps point out
in the documentation that the values for PlaybackTimeWindow are
designated in the time reference of the data -- not the render time,
nor the normalized animation time.

	Thanks again,
	Bill

>
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Utkarsh Ayachit
> <utkarsh.ayachit at kitware.com>  wrote:
>> 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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