[GRASSLIST:356] NVIZ : getting a script to run

[Soil & Water Lab.]

Hello,
Under peer pressure, I decided to display results in 3D with NVIZ (I run 
5.0.0.pre5 on a linux i386). Thanks to the tutorial, I eventually managed to 
create a script displaying these maps and outputting a series of .PPM files. 
Neat. Except that :

* the exportation seems to be run with image dump (screen capture). You 
imagine the result,  if I move windows other nviz or change of desktop to 
check my emails.   Is it one of the features that has been corrected in 5.0.2 
? Is there a workaround (apart leaving the nviz window on the top, decreasing 
the pause time to speed up the process, and not checking my emails) ?

* I now have nice '.RGB' or '.PPM ' files (well, the ones that are usable), 
weighting each several hundreds of kb, if not several Mb, which causes a 
problem of space. Is there a trick to run a conversion command in the nviz 
script ? I'd like to store the pictures as .PNG, as I can always transform a 
PNG in PPM during the creation of a MPEG (quality is less important than size 
in my case), and cannot really wait for the exportation to end before startng 
the conversion.

Apart from this: 

* I'm embedding the nviz script in a larger bash script,as a here document. 
Everything runs pretty smoothly (after escaping the $ of course), but how do 
I quit nviz (still staying  in the parent script) ?

*I'm afraid I missed something: can I change the state in a loop ? That'll 
allow me to get a 'moving viepoint' animation, scripted.

* Is there any howto describing how to write a state, or, what's the meaning 
of each line/variable in the state file ? I could figure some of them, but 
hav no idea for the others.

Sorry, that's a lot of question at once, but any suggestion would be more than 
welcome.

Thanks
P.


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Soil and Water Laboratory
Biological and Environmental Engineering Department
Cornell University
Riley-Robb Hall
ITHACA, NY 14853 - USA