I would like some more ideas of how to render cinematic scenes (or even just scenes in general). Intuitively, I can only think of two methods to render a scene (as in, make things go in a specific order w/special effects etc...) The First is to change the scene depending on the current frame... The Second is to change the scene based on time... Are there any other ways out there? Which do you use, why? Nate

check out this article:

Understanding and Implementing Scene Graphs

Joel Martinez
http://www.codecube.net/

You should actually combine your two methods. You render a frame of a scene depending on the time. Since this isn''t realtime rendering (you''ll be saving the frame as an image to be formed into a movie), you can manually increment the time based upon your desired framerate.

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I am currently building an animation program and i really quickly found out specifying a number of frames per second only for rendering to a file and doing timebased movement is THE way, especially if you''re going to use sound and/or a particle system (gravity, wind and such).

If anyone knows a good way of using per-frame movement for animation (as in cartoons), please tell me .