Hi all,

    I agree with this wholeheartedly and I'm implementing it (and more) as
you read. What I'm doing, though, won't be as seamless as many of you might
like. What I'm working on is a Perl module for POVRay. It is still in the
very early stages but I think it should work quite well. The reason I
started doing this is because I wanted to do some pretty complex animation
stuff (like object collisions, etc) and was finding the POV language
limiting. Perl is quite robust and fast and can probably handle many things
better than POV.
    There are a number of features this could be added once the base stuff
is in place. Stuff like easy object collision routines, physics stuff
(gravity, friction, etc), and just about anything you could think of. For
now I'm sticking with the basics but we'll see how it goes.
    I really think that POV is being limited by its need to be mostly
backwards compatible in the language. Also the fact that people good at
programming a ray-tracer may not be that good at writing a good language.
I'm not saying that I'm good at it either but I'm hopeing to build something
useful. Probably better than the way I'm doing it would be to change POV so
that it accepts a well-defined binary scene file and people could build any
type of preparser they like.
    Please don't think any of this is criticism to the POV team.
    Below is a small example. The syntax is mostly there but some things
will likely change as things advance more. I'll post here when things are to
the testing point. If you are interested in helping on this project please
contact me. Knowledge of Perl (and POV of course) are needed.


# beginning of perl script
use POV;

my $test = Scene->new;

my $tempPoint = Point->new( 1, 1, 1 );
my $thing1 = Sphere->new( $origin, 0.5 );

my $myTexture = Texture->new;
$myTexture->{pigment}->{color}->set( 1, 0, 1);
$thing1->{texture} = $myTexture;

$test->{camera}->{location}->set( 1, 1, -10 );
$test->{camera}->{look_at}->set( 1, 1, 1 );

my $count = 0;
while( $count < 10 ) {
    $thing1->{location}->{y}++;
    $test->render( "test", 640, 480 );
    $count++;
}

print "done\n";
# end example script


--Rainer


Lukee wrote in message <3654A5E9.90504827@altavista.net>...
>Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel POVRay would strongly need some
>kind of "render" statement
[snip]
>Luca Rivelli <luk### [at] usanet>

Post a reply to this message