> I am developing an application which involves a virtual environment. I want to
> have a (set of) virtual camera(s) and objects in a scene, and all of these are
> going to be changed semi-interactively (doesn't have to be real-time.) I like
> to use povray to achieve this. [...]
>
> I want this because the overhead of creating a pov file (scene file), calling
> the "povray" executable then parsing it for every frame is significant. My
> scene is simple and does not change a lot. [...]

A very partial solution: Instead of one call per camera and timepoint you can
do with one call per timepoint as follows:
Combine all cameras that you need into a single one. In principle this means
aligning the individual views into one somewhat larger view. This can be done
with user-defined cameras, as supported AIUI by MegaPov. After the MegaPov
call you would cut the output image into the pieces you actually need. Be
sure not to use jittering antialiasing, though.

In case your virtual environment allows this, maybe you can even replace the
user-defined camera by a standard camera plus a system of mirrors or such.
This would allow to use plain POVray, but it will not work for arbitrary
scenes.

Best regards,

  Mark Weyer

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