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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Chambers <ben [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> 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

That would be nice. Especially for binary versions of native POV primitives. See
http://news.povray.org/web.477fdfecd9aea8ace91832b60%40news.povray.org

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For this it would also be nice to read the existing material names and their
definitions, and support overriding the materials somehow.

import
{
  obj "plane.obj"
  usemtl "plane.mtl"
  material "surface"
  {
    texture
    {
      pigment { ... }
      finish { .. }
    }
  }
  material "glass"
  {
    ...
  }
  material "tires"
  {
  }
}

Not a very good syntax, but something like that would be nice if loading
external model data.

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