POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.programming : Extending the #read directive : Re: Extending the #read directive Server Time
18 May 2024 05:30:20 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Extending the #read directive  
From: Hugo Asm
Date: 8 May 2003 09:43:21
Message: <3eba5ef9$1@news.povray.org>
> If I can somehow predict intentions

No, but thanks for trying. My case deals with all software that outputs a
text file, with some information that could be used in a POV-Ray scene file.
There has been a few occasions where I could easily have written a
"converter" in SDL, if just POV-Ray could read those files. Most recent
example is the following:

1) Other software outputs a mesh2 for POV-Ray.

2) Animation in POV-Ray requires interpolation between sets of mesh2 data
(keyframes in a character animation). I wrote a macro to interpolate the
data.

3) However, I need to manually convert the mesh2 data, into a set of
array's, because otherwise a macro can't read them.

If I could search the mesh2 file, for the right place to begin loading all
the vertex vectors, normal vectors, etc.. this would run automatic. So far I
have to use the copy-and-paste methods, and with a lot of mesh2 input, this
is not very clever. The alternative is to modify POV-Ray, or modify the
other software, to output files that follow the rules of the #read
directive.

But I think the most user-friendly thing to do, is to modify POV-Ray. Most
software cannot output for POV-Ray, even if they can output some text files.
I could write an .obj converter in SDL since this file-format is text based.
I remember a case where someone mentioned a particle-system that runs
independant of POV-Ray, but it's output is text-based and could be converted
in SDL. The user had to manually edit the files.

Convinced?  :o)

Hugo


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