Exporting Image

[DomC]

Hi

The Result of my efforts should be, to export steps in a generative design-scripts as images on the disk. This would be the base, of an animation to see, what happens in a script.

This works in a Vectorscript without any problems as follows:

criteria="(INSYMBOL & INOBJECT & INVIEWPORT & (N='temp_name_domc'))"

vs.SelectObj(criteria)
vs.DoMenuTextByName('Copy',0)
vs.DoMenuTextByName('Paste As Picture',0)
h = vs.LNewObj()
vs.DelName('temp_name_domc') 

#vs.ExportImageFile(hImage, 'BildExportTest.png')

In a Marionette Node, this will not work, because the copy command will not work.

My Questions:

1. Anyone knows another way (Instead of do menu Text) do export something as an image file?

2. Somebody knows, why copy (and cut) do not work inside a marionette Script? This is too bad.

Imagine, we could animate growing things in marionette. In a Vectorscript it works, so it just seems to be a limitation of Marionette.

The Workaround at the moment seems to be, to create layers for every step and export those layers as an image. Or use them as a flicker book.

Attached movie shows a simple example, of what I want to be able to do (without the flipper-book workaround just with marionette)

Edited August 17, 2016 by DomC

[AlanW]

Dom,

Not sure if this helps.

Animates the hands on the Clock.

Alan

Edited August 18, 2016 by Alan Woodwell

[DomC]

The Idea is, to have a generally node for that. The existing examples (as above) use a redraw command inside every move node (So we had to "hack" every node)

And I think, that will not nice in OpenGL, any 3D View or bigger networks (too slow)

Sure, we (I :grin: ) can do this with a code-script (also the export as images) without marionette. But "without marionette" is not the ambition.

I wanted to use this, to make nice documentations of marionette scripts.

[DomC]

Not tried, but I think I found it.

vs.CreateImageFromPaint(paint, imageName)

[Patrick Winkler]

Great idea!

I think the criteria is the problem.

The Copy command works fine in this node:

@Marionette.NodeDefinition
class Params(metaclass = Marionette.OrderedClass):
this = Marionette.Node( 'Copy and Paste As Picture' )
this.SetDescription( 'Do nothing node. It just passes the input to the output: y = x' )
this.SetListAbsorb()
x = Marionette.PortIn( [] )
x.SetDescription( "input" )

pic = Marionette.PortOut()   
pic.SetDescription( "Handle of the picture" )

def RunNode(self):
vs.DoMenuTextByName('Copy',0)
vs.DoMenuTextByName('Paste As Picture',0)

h_pic = vs.LActLayer()
# vs.LNewObj Failed in this situation!

if vs.GetTypeN(h_pic) == 14: # BitMap
	self.Params.pic.value = h_pic
else:
	self.Params.pic.value = 'Something went wrong'

[Patrick Winkler]

I was able generate and export a range of images but unfortunately they look all the same.

I have also tried to iterate trough the list of objs in a loop but this leads to the Error: 'Menu Copy is disabled'.

vs.CreateImageFromPaint(paint, imageName) crashes VW.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Patrick Winkler

[DomC]

I heard a rumour, that we can just wait for one of the next versions :-)

I looked at : "vs.CreateImageFromPaint(paint, imageName)"

This converts an Image Resource from an imported Picture. "Paint" is an image in the drawing and "Image" is an image fill resource in this context.

I also looked for a way to make a handle as a criteria. Cause some of the very powerful script commands works with criteria.

there could be a way with pdf export to generate frames for a movie.

There are some python library to convert images to mp4 so there should be a way to automate exporting a movie.

For now I make it with created Layers inside Marionette and a seperate Python script, which exports the layers as jpg frames. And then the shareware

"Time Lapse Assembler.app" to connect jpgs to mp4. I will post some examples if they are ready to post.