"Corey Woodworth" <cdw### [at] mpinetnet> wrote in
news:3cb6bc3a$1@news.povray.org: 

> In Wings I changed the materials of the hexagons to black so that it'd
> look more soccerbally. I saved it as .3ds and then used crossroads to
> convert it to pov 3.0, Now its all white!

Crossroads won't retain Wings materials if you export via 3DS format.  You 
have to use the Wavefront OBJ format.  Crossroads will strip the material 
colors from OBJ imports, but it will keep the textures separate so you can 
put the proper textures in place by editing the pov file.

Exporting geometry from Wings into Povray via Crossroads is a bit of a 
black art.  For organic shapes, be sure to resmooth everything in 
Crossroads or you'll see facets everywhere.  Also be aware that high 
polygon counts are almost always necessary to avoid ugly artifacts.

I suspect that your soccer ball might have too few polygons for it to look 
right.  Try smoothing it a few more times in Wings.

> Blechk. Is there another, better, possibly newer program I
> should be using to covert things?

Not yet.  3DWin used to be freely available, but the author pulled a bait-
and-switch and made it crippleware.

I have started to write a multiformat conversion utility which can read 
OBJ, LWO (both version types) and 3DS and export into POV, but I don't 
presently have that much time to spend working on it.  Since I am planning 
on releasing the tool under the GPL, I am prepared, however, offer up what 
source code I have (C++; the OBJ importer and core data structures are 
mostly written) if anyone else wants to take a shot.  

> I've seen other POVers use wings and considering its open source maybe
> the author would consider including a mesh1 and mesh2 pov export to the
> program? Has anyone contacted him about this before?

Not to my knowledge.  This route is probably, IMO, the best option for 
decent Wings to Pov export.

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