Funny, I was just about to restart work on my Python project for 
creating .pov files when I came across this thread ;)

Creating our scenes using programming languages is a rather
interesting subject, because programming languages are
extremely powerful. We can define the scene in our own
concepts and build our own interfaces. We can integrate with the
rest of the OS platform, eg. to visualize IP router or WWW server 
logs :) I had been thinking of many of the ideas people proposed
in this thread, it only strikes me as funny that nobody proposed
reading the objects etc. to render from a SQL database ;)

The Povray scene description language can be fairly simple and bare
bone, as we can always create our own complex systems to describe
scenes. However, I doubt if another, general purpose scene 
description language can be that useful. Povray users will use
the software for very different things, and they like to work
at various abstraction levels, for various aspects of their 
scenes. I like to do stuff like

for i in range(24):
        angle = i * pi / 12
        x = cos(angle)
        y = sin(angle)
        bigtower(30 * x, 30 * y)

Which will place 24 towers with detailed decorations in a circle...
could be extended to put connectors between them, etc.

I use a simple Python program(s) to write the objects in a .pov file.
It is in procedural style and doesn't do very much yet, but it's
quite handy for my purposes. 

But my project is more than that: it's a complete solution for
handling Povray projects. I use Python, shell scripts and make 
to create the .pov file and render it. I'll need to add creating
new projects and archiving existing ones to it.

I thought it could be added to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
as a package. I think you could run it on other platforms as well,
because UNIX-like environments are available there. I gather there
are similar projects out there, so maybe I'll just do some minor
contributions to one, instead of reinventing the wheel.

-- 
Risto Varanka

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