In article <3E0125AF.B0325AA1@pacbell.net>, tyl### [at] pacbellnet says...
> 
> 
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> 
> > I always found it a bit annoying that no one ever started a free GUI
> > modeller project with the same open development as POVRay itself,
> 
> That's not entirely true. In fact there have been at least two 'attempts'
> at open source modelling programs for POV-Ray that I am aware of but they
> both failed for various reasons. POVLAB, which had a sizable user base at
> one time, was released by it's author as open source over three years ago
> yet no one has touched it since. Why? Don't know, but it seems it takes a
> rare group of individuals to take on an open source project and provide the
> long term dedication and resources necessary to keep it alive. The POV-Ray
> developers deserve a lot of credit in that regard.
> 
> 
Yes that is quite annoying. POVLab had a great deal of potential (more 
than Moray in some respects, since development on Moray seems to be 
dedicated to never quite correctly supporting all POVRay's features...). 
The fact that it never quite did everything always bugged me. On a side 
note.. Does the new version still only display a container box for 
meshes? That was something else that I found quite useless.

In any case, digging around my system to see what stuff I had installed I 
found a version 4.0 of one called 3D Canvas. It imports 3DS, DirectX, 
TrueSpace COB, DXF, VRML 1.0 and POVRay!? (only 2.2 syntax though). It 
also exports to POVRay. I am pretty sure I got it off a 3D magazine of 
some sort, so finding the a free copy could be difficult, but the thing I 
like is that it correctly imports the DXF files as separate objects 
(instead of doing what most others I tried do and export them as one 
single undifferentiated mesh) and lets you apply textures to each of 
those pieces. I still need to get used to the interface and I do find it 
annoying that object properties are harder to get to than in Moray, but 
it seems like the always have to screw something up in these things. lol

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