On 02-03-07 20:01, Laurence H Smith wrote:
> I have produced a .pov file from an Eagle circuit board file and I am trying 
> to Render it in Pov-Ray for Mac OS X 3.6.0. Here is what is happening: 
> 
> 	I double clicked the .pov file and it launches POV-RAY just fine
> 
> 	The spinning beach ball stays on for about 10 minutes and finally shows me 
> the file.
> 
> I select Render and the spinning beach ball stays on for about 10 minutes.

I'm on a Mac as well and experience much of the same thing as you.
I haven't waited 10 minutes though, but as soon as I load the POV file 
into POVray (http://mac.povray.org/) the beachball starts to spin.
If I press ALT-CMD I can see that POVray "not responding", so I do a 
force quit.
The strange thing is that the beachball starts to spin as soon as I 
*open* the POV file, not because I've chosen "render"!!??!?!?!
Very strange.

And yes, I've taken care to define the path to Eagle 3D's "POVray" 
folder (by going to POVray's "Edit"-"Preference"-"Scenes" menu.

Now even stranger is the fact that the above happens only when I open 
the file by going to POVray's "File"-"Open" menu, but then only if I 
choose "All documents". If the file-selector's choices are set to any of 
the other choices (POVray documents etc.) the POV files are greyed out, 
making them unselectable!

However, if the Eagle 3D POVray folder isn't defined I don't get the 
spinning beachball, but an error message about not finding the files in 
that folder.


Seeing that I didn't have much success with POVray I came across and 
decided to try out MegaPOV (http://megapov.inetart.net/).

Like with POVray I had to define the path to Eagle 3D's "POVray" folder.
It's a little confusing because it seems like this can be done in one of 
two places:
"MegaPOV"-"Preferences"-"System includes"
or
"Window"-"Render preferences"-"Files & paths"-"Set search paths for 
additional include files"

In any case, when opening the POV file I don't end up with a spinning 
beachball (and "not responding") as with POVray, but whenever I try to 
render ("Render"-"Render" menu) I get a bunch of different error 
messages such as:

-------------------------
Line: 38
File Context (5 lines):
#declare col_preset = 2;
#declare pin_short = on;
#declare environment
Parse Error: Expected 'undeclared identifier', environment found instead
-------------------------


or:
-------------------------
Parse Error: Illegal character in input file, value is 02
-------------------------


So no success so far on my Mac (PowerBook G4 (1.67GHz), MacOS 10.4.10, 
1.5Gbytes RAM).


Next, since I'm an Eagle novice and have never used neither Eagle 3D nor 
POVray, I decided to see if I got into the same problems when running it 
on a Windows PC.

Once having installed both Eagle 3D and POVray on the PC I transferred 
my previously made POV files (with Eagle 3D on my Mac) over to the PC, 
then tried to render them with POVray. Worked right away!
And I had deliberately chosen a very simple board, in order to make the 
rendering process fast. It took about 5 seconds to do (and this is on a 
5 year old Pentium 4, 1.9GHz, 256Mbytes RAM which is a lot less powerful 
than my Powerbook).
So I don't think processing power has anything to do with these issues.

I've tried several different POV files generated with my Mac, and they 
all rendered perfectly on the PC.
And of course POV files generated with Eagle 3D in Eagle on the PC work 
fine as well.

All this tells me that either there's a problem with POVray/MegaPOV on 
my Mac, or that the POV files aren't cross-platform compatible (even 
though the files were created on the Mac the same ULP script file as 
with the PC has been used).

It would be very interesting to try other POV files than the ones I've 
made with Eagle 3D myself, created by both PCs and Macs.
Are there any such files available for download somewhere?

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