"Christoph Hormann" <chr### [at] gmxde> wrote:

> You should have mentioned that the subset of Povray syntax supported is
> extremely limited right now, only few basic shapes, no light sources.
I actually did, only I made it sound a bit better :-). Sorry if I made it
sound too good, but those are the object types that I use most often in
my scenes [except for plane, which is some problem, as OpenGL doesn't know
about infinite objects...].

> There are some things of course that will probably never be fully
> available like all the patterns and functions like 'trace'.
You're probably right concerning "trace", and I'm not sure if it is feasible
at all to try to emulate POV-Ray's texture support using OpenGL.
It's true that VOP will _never_ support the full POV-Ray language, but with
a few well-placed #ifdef(__VOP__)s...

> Therefore i
> think building a OpenGL render mode directly into Povray will probably be
> a better approach.

However, the approach used in VOP also has some very clear advantages:
When rendering animations, VOP can skip the parsing phase in most case.
It can recalculate most expressions in the pov file from an intermediate
representation that doesn't exit (and wouldn't be useful) in POV-Ray, thus
saving _lots_ of time after the first frame. I have a simple animated scene
that takes 70 seconds per frame to render in POV-Ray. I have to wait about 5
seconds until VOP shows the first frame (thats 14 times as fast), but after
that the animation runs at 28 frames per second (thats 1960 times as fast!).

For the far future, I'm dreaming of rendering and re-rendering the scene
_as you type it in_. (I don't know if I'll ever manage _that_, however).



Wolfgang

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