Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel POVRay would strongly need some
kind of "render" statement. Let me explain: with version 3.1, POV has 

achieved the status of a nearly complete programming language. It has 

its own cyles, conditional tests, macros etc. BUT we still have to make 

animations by the quite primitive mathod of calling the program
repeatedly with different arguments: this means re-parsing every time

and no chance of doing a complex animation. I know, now POV can read and

write files, but using them to store temporary variable values seems to

me a bit dumb. What we really need is a siple "render" statement. e.g









#declare a_cross = union {



			cylinder { <-1.5,0,0>, <1.5,0,0>, 0.3}

			cylinder { <0,1.5,0>, <0,-1.5,0>, 0.3}		



		   }	











#macro DrawCross (rot,trans, colr)

	object {a_cross

		texture {pigment {color rgb colr}}

		rotate rot translate trans 

	}



#end







#declare cycles=0;



#while (cycles<36)

	DrawCross(<0,cycles*10,0>,<0,0,0>,<0,.8,.2>)

	#declare cycles=cycles+1;



	render <sort of a numbered-filename>//<- THIS IS THE NEW DIRECTIVE!



#end







The above code would render to a different file every time it comes upon

the "render" directive (36 times) from WITHIN the cycle, rather than at

the end of the complete parsing, thus outputting an animation. This way,
we could avoid working outside the POV program with limited .INI files
to achieve any kind of animation, at any level of complexity: particle
systems, mesh distortion/morphing ecc. POV would become the most
flexible 3D system in the world.



Am I wrong?



Could this be implemented via a patch (I don't think I have the skill to

do that)?



Please tell me your opinion!



Luca Rivelli <luk### [at] usanet>

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