"ABX" <abx### [at] abxartpl> wrote in message
news:u28fav447mcau01qpr6imqst4o0m0uf238@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:05:48 +0100, "CB" <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:
> > I have a model built from various POV primitives and I would like to
export
> > it to another 3D package - possible the free version of Truespace.
> >
> > Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
> > textures?
>
> Not that I want you give an answer but I'm seriously interested why you
used
> POV-Ray as modeller here? Is that it is just easy to operate? Or what ?

Well, I built the model several years ago - about 1994 - as a logo for a
local charity. At that time (as far as I recall) there didn't seem to be any
free GUI-based 3D modellers. I first encountered POV a year or so before
that when example images really fired my imagination - the logo was my pet
project for getting involved in POV.

Also at the time there was no support for Truetype fonts in POV, so I
managed to use a utility that came with POLYRAY to export truetype text
strings to smooth_triangle meshes. The meshes formed flat-faced extruded
text. and I even managed to write a filter (in awk of all things!) to bevel
the text. The problem was that the POLYRAY utility exported a LOT of
triangles for each letter which took ages just to parse on my 486 DX. I
eventually got help from a guy at Oracle who created the animation on a
Winserver running in the background, but even this took several days to
complete. The final animation was in DTA (Dave's Targa Animator) format.

Since then I have done very little 3D work, but was recently asked to
reproduce the animation with some textual changes. At least now some of the
flat-faced text could be defined directly in the current version of POVray
using the truetype object, and this speeded up rendering a LOT! This time
the animation was done for (interlaced) TV.

However, these days it looks fairly uninspiring viewed from a static
location, hence my desire to sweep the camera past and around it. It looks
like this can't be done effectively in POVray so either I somehow export the
model to another 3D package, or rebuild it from scratch in another 3D
package. I'd rather avoid having to rebuild it if possible.

(Incidentally, I first became interested in 3D CGI in about 1982 when I got
hold of a copy of the legendary Foley and Van Dam "The Fundamentals of
Interactive Computer Graphics" which contained the algorithms for
translation and rotation of objects in 3D space. At the time I had just
acquired a Sinclair ZX81 so I wrote a 3D package in Sinclair Basic!)

Sorry for the long reply - I got carried away!

Regards

Colin

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