I have been using povray for roughly 48hours now having tried a couple of the
tutorials. Povray 3.6.1 has been successfully installed under SuSE 11.2 (64bit)
running on a Intel Celsius with 4 x Xeon 2.66GHz

I am trying to raytrace a number of anatomical structures (mesh2 objects). I
have successfully raytraced a single object for a simple camera set up

location<0,1000,0>
look at <0,0,0>
The up vector is <0,0,1> i.e. along +ve z-axis

I now want to orbit the camera around the structure in the xy plane - simple
enough to work out the necessary location coordinates of the camera. In the
first instance only the camera position is altered for the orbit location. Thus
the up vector remains unaltered(?)

Secondly I want to be able to rotate the camera about the direction vector
-(look at -location). Thus I need to update the up vector accordingly.

My questions are:

i) is it better to rotate the camera about the direction vector, or apply the
inverse camera matrix to the structure (to rotate and translate it) and keep the
camera fixed (thereby generating the same image)

ii) how can I automate the orbit? Do I need to generate a .pov file for a single
camera position. Or can I read in one file containing the mesh2 object and then
pass a number of simple "camera" files to povray containing the necessary camera
setup. Or should I simply define all camera positions in the .pov file and allow
povray to serially raytrace each camera (60 < number of cameras <= 180)

iii) is it possible to write a pbm file directly with povray since I am really
only interested in whether the image pixel is inside (1) or outside the mesh (0)
As far as I can tell povray outputs .png .tga or .ppm. Since speed is critical I
want to avoid having to convert the images into pbm files (which are used for
further processing)

iv) is there a way to batch run the raytracing of multiple structures either in
series or preferably in parallel on different CPUs?

Sorry this post is rather long

Thanks

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