"krnl Jnz" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.467fd4e9fab32d10a606a85b0@news.povray.org...
>I hope this is not a dumb question.
> Is there a way to run a PovRay file through a program and have an 
> animation
> that is created by polygons.
> This I believe would be like using some sort of games style rendering
> engine.
> Would I be able to see the complete animation in a shorter amount time?
>
> Thanks.
>

Hi,

It's a little hard from this description to tell exactly what you'd like to 
do, but I'm guessing you'd like to convert objects from a POV-Ray scene file 
into a format that could be rendered by another piece of software. Then I'm 
guessing you're wanting to use the other software to do something like a 
fly-through, or some form of real-time navigation through the scene.

I don't think you'll find a converter that would easily do that for you, but 
there are some things that you might want to consider instead:

There is an experimental real-time ray-tracing feature in Beta 17 of POV-Ray 
see http://www.povray.org/beta/rtr/.

Alternatively VRML lets you fly-through scenes in real time (using a VRML 
viewer). Other 3D formats also support quicker rendering that could give you 
quicker animations or real-time rendering. So far as I'm aware there's no 
automatic way of converting from POV-Ray format to a polygon based format, 
but there are a number of things in POV-Ray that can help.

You can use the trace function to 'scan' an object and you can write out the 
coordinates of the points and the surface normals into a file.
There are various functions available that can convert an array of points 
and normals into a mesh object which you may be able to canabalise to create 
a format that is closer to the format required by another 3D format. e.g. 
VRML format.

Regards,
Chris B.

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