Coridon Henshaw wrote:
> 
> IMO, improved mesh support (such as direct loading of a few standard
> formats, or at least a Pov-specific fast parsing binary mesh format)
> mesh animation tools are something which should be seriously considered
> for Pov 4. 

I can only agree partly with you. POVRay is a renderer. IMHO this shouldn't
be changed. In particular, povray should include a modeler but modelers
should be kept separate from the rendering engine. This simplifies the 
task of writing and maintaining (one of) the best rendering software that 
can on a variety of platforms.

You are right in the request that povray should support such modelers --
at least to some extent. The concept of a human readable file format has
been proven to be useful in many applications. With the advent of a bunch
of XML file formats this number will even increase in future. If you are
worried about file sizes, a very easy and clean solution would be the
support of zipped files. Unzipping the file on the fly is already possible
nowadays.

IMHO it is not a good idea to support other file formats. Again it is
easier to factor out this functionality and support other file formats
via converters. So, I suggest to include some converters in the standard
distribution of povray. The GUI could even hide the fact that converters
are used from the user.

When it come to features like NURBs or Surface Subdivision, I agree that
supporting them in povray would be a big win. Modelers or converters 
would be easier to write in this case.

Just my 0.02 Euro
Thomas

Post a reply to this message