Yes I know it's been done before in a special patched version of
povray at some point. But very poorly. (POB format)

Basically, What I'd like to be able to do is compile a scene- with all
it's various include files and image files and data files- into a
single compressed binary file. Or at least into a single in line ascii
file - like say.. a pdf. 

This file would have custom "default" ini file settings inline with it
to. This is all towards the goal of making distributed rendering
easier. This is also partially inspired by the above post about a
napster llike distributed rendering system. 


Basically if you can have a scene- animation or no- compiled into a
single file it makes it easier to send around because the other person
doesn't have to set up the proper include files, all the image files
etc in the right directories for it to even work properly . 


This could possibly even be achieved by making it simple collect all
the files into a zip file- correcting the dependancies, and allowing
it to render directly from a zip file. radiosity data included.

command line options added to the end override the ini file defaults
in the zip file. 


In application to the napster like program proposed above, it could
work like this:


You press a button in the program and it finds the computers on the
network that seem the least taxed at the moment. Then it splits up the
render for each those computers into little bites and sends the
appropriate commandline options with each zip file. 

Then the host computers call up duplicate copies of povray (perhaps
povray is built into it?) To render the packets.


This is probably a really old idea, but one which I'd like to see cos
it'd make big renders much easier to do across multiple computers.

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