SDL is a tool used by POVers to describe their scenes.  As such, it is 
extremely useful and efficient for anything procedural, but not much use 
for anything else.

However, the main core of POV-Ray itself is the renderer, NOT the SDL 
parser.  That being said, the ability to import binary file formats into 
your scene would ease scene creation greatly.

Something like this:

---
camera {...}

import3d {
  3ds "object.3ds"
  translate <x,y,z>
}

import3d {
  obj "other.obj"
  rotate <x,y,z>
}

Obviously, not everything would be possible.  However, for those file 
formats requiring parameters to set up the objects, those parameters 
should be assignable from the SDL.

Also obviously, not all file formats are used equally, so effort should 
be used first to add support for the most commonly used by POVers (I 
would imagine that Poser files would have a high priority for this).

Perhaps an extensible plugin system could be implemented, like other 
projects use.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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