In article <40e564ab$1@news.povray.org>, "Josh" <som### [at] microsoftcom> 
wrote:

> PovRay can read text files, you would have to interpret the data and convert
> it to PovRay format. 

More importantly, the POV-Ray scene description language has file I/O 
commands, so if your data is formatted appropriately, you can write a 
scene that reads it directly.


> And bascily PovRay is really good at graphics

POV is very good at photorealistic graphics, and 3D surfaces, solids, 
and volumetrics. Line art is an example of something POV is not very 
good at. Especially 3D line art. Cylinder approximations of fine "lines" 
have a tendency to disappear or alias very badly, and the raytracing 
algorithm is simply very inefficient for drawing this sort of graphics.

Here's a crazy idea: a simple scripting language with support for 3D 
math and PostScript output may be of use for this kind of 
graphics...maybe it could even be squeezed into POV, so it could take 
advantage of things like depth buffers to clip obscured portions of the 
line drawing. Output would be a PostScript file which could be overlayed 
on top of the image with an external program, or perhaps POV could 
incorporate the necessary 2D drawing primitives (requiring a fair amount 
of extra work to implement).
This would be fairly useless for most artistic purposes (though it might 
have use for quick-rendering grass, hair, etc), but would be very useful 
for things like annotating visualizations of scientific data.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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