The Viewer has a special feature that allows you to create animations that fly around and through a cave. Animations work differently from movies. Instead of saving separate pictures of the cave as the movies do, animations work by saving the Pan, Zoom and Rotation parameters for individual viewpoint of the cave. The program then takes two of these points and calculates a number of intermediate points. Playing back the intermediates points in rapid succession produces a smooth animation.
There are several advantages to animation. First, since you are only saving the pan, zoom and rotation parameter for each point of view, the amount information needed to produce a large animation is very small. Second, since the computer generates all the intermediate points, it is relatively easy to produce smooth cave animations.
Activating. To activate the Animation tool of the Viewer, select "Tools->Animations" option from the menu bar. (You must have a file open before you can activate the animation features.) This will display the Animation window.
The Animation Window consists of two pages. The first page handles creating animations and the second page deals with saving animations to files. Here is detailed information about each page:
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