"Tommy P. Thompson" wrote:

> With Povray, is it possible to output JPG or GIF files? I know there are
> command line options for .bmp, .ppm, and .tga files but no jpg or gif.
> If povray cant do this, then what steps should I take to convert to JPG
> format?. All the povray scenes I see on the net are in JPG format.

    Way back when, real programmers coded in Hex directly to ZIP
distribution format.

    The problem here is similar. While theoretically possible, it would take
a hell of a lot of practice. Both of those are compressed formats. As such
they work on clusters of pixels, horizontal and vertical. POV renders
horizontal lines.

    Now POV could render in small squares but compression routines would
have to know what is in the adjacent squares for storing what is near the
boundaries.

    So ultimately, POV would have to do exactly what it does now and then
convert to GIF or JPEG. And since there are plenty of free conversion
utilities, why not let the user do it himself? And with JPEG there is the
user option of quality as a variable but it does not really mean anything
quantifiable despite the percents and slide bars you might see on the
conversion utilities. They are purely qualitative.

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