Hmm. Doing this sort of thing - recording a path, anyway -
involves external scripting of some sort. It's not built-in to
partiview.
Things you can do with it as it stands:
(type in the text box)
jump X Y Z [xrot yrot zrot]
e.g. you could say
jump 0.52 69.11 10.16
to jump to the middle of the Coma cluster, facing whichever
direction you were before
Another very useful thing is to set the "center" to be in the midst
of something interesting - then you can easily tour around that
point, interactively, using the left and right mouse buttons (or,
left- and alt-left if you're on a Mac). So, you could pick a point
that's roughly in the middle of the three clusters I mentioned, like
center 5 64 24
and spin around there to pick a nice starting point.
To find out where you are, just type:
jump
and note the six numbers it prints out. You can feed those same
numbers back to a later "jump" command to return there.
You can write (probably with some sort of program) a text file where
each line is some set of seven blank-separated numbers. The first
six are a set of X Y Z xrot yrot zrot, as from "jump", and the
seventh is a field-of-view measure in degrees. Then you can load
that path into partiview using the "Path..." button, or the "rdata"
command. Then pressing Play will make the viewpoint tour along the
given sequence of camera positions, frame by frame.
What sort of computing environment do you have? E.g. a Mac, or a
windows PC, or what? If you have something where you can run
scripts written in either the languages Perl or Python, I could send
a script that would generate a path, as a command-line sort of
thing.
You'd open a Terminal window (if on a Mac) or a Run -> "cmd"
command window (if on Windows) and type something like:
perl
somescript.pl startX,Y,Z endX,Y,Z nframes >
pathfile.wf
and then in partiview you'd type
rdata
pathfile.wf
and hit the Play button, and it would tour along the constructed
path.
There is a way to record a sequence of images too. The "msnapper"
script in the "scripts" directory (do you have that in your
distribution? if not I can send it) makes a sequence of commands
that tells partiview to take a screen snapshot for every frame.
If you're on a Mac, it should work handily. If on Windows, it's a
bit more roundabout. I'll say more when I understand what you have
to work with. But generally you'd type something like, in the
partiview text box,
async perl msnapper imagename.%04d.jpeg 1 nframes
You asked about making it look as it would in life - there isn't a
provision for doing that.