I have a model built from various POV primitives and I would like to export
it to another 3D package - possible the free version of Truespace.

Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
textures?

Thanks

Colin

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On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:05:48 +0100, "CB" <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:
> I have a model built from various POV primitives and I would like to export
> it to another 3D package - possible the free version of Truespace.
>
> Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
> textures?

Not that I want you give an answer but I'm seriously interested why you used
POV-Ray as modeller here? Is that it is just easy to operate? Or what ?

ABX

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"ABX" <abx### [at] abxartpl> wrote in message
news:u28fav447mcau01qpr6imqst4o0m0uf238@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:05:48 +0100, "CB" <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:
> > I have a model built from various POV primitives and I would like to
export
> > it to another 3D package - possible the free version of Truespace.
> >
> > Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
> > textures?
>
> Not that I want you give an answer but I'm seriously interested why you
used
> POV-Ray as modeller here? Is that it is just easy to operate? Or what ?

Well, I built the model several years ago - about 1994 - as a logo for a
local charity. At that time (as far as I recall) there didn't seem to be any
free GUI-based 3D modellers. I first encountered POV a year or so before
that when example images really fired my imagination - the logo was my pet
project for getting involved in POV.

Also at the time there was no support for Truetype fonts in POV, so I
managed to use a utility that came with POLYRAY to export truetype text
strings to smooth_triangle meshes. The meshes formed flat-faced extruded
text. and I even managed to write a filter (in awk of all things!) to bevel
the text. The problem was that the POLYRAY utility exported a LOT of
triangles for each letter which took ages just to parse on my 486 DX. I
eventually got help from a guy at Oracle who created the animation on a
Winserver running in the background, but even this took several days to
complete. The final animation was in DTA (Dave's Targa Animator) format.

Since then I have done very little 3D work, but was recently asked to
reproduce the animation with some textual changes. At least now some of the
flat-faced text could be defined directly in the current version of POVray
using the truetype object, and this speeded up rendering a LOT! This time
the animation was done for (interlaced) TV.

However, these days it looks fairly uninspiring viewed from a static
location, hence my desire to sweep the camera past and around it. It looks
like this can't be done effectively in POVray so either I somehow export the
model to another 3D package, or rebuild it from scratch in another 3D
package. I'd rather avoid having to rebuild it if possible.

(Incidentally, I first became interested in 3D CGI in about 1982 when I got
hold of a copy of the legendary Foley and Van Dam "The Fundamentals of
Interactive Computer Graphics" which contained the algorithms for
translation and rotation of objects in 3D space. At the time I had just
acquired a Sinclair ZX81 so I wrote a 3D package in Sinclair Basic!)

Sorry for the long reply - I got carried away!

Regards

Colin

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> It looks
> like this can't be done effectively in POVray

BTW, I wrote the previous message before noticing your latest 2 replies in
the previous thread, which I will investigate!

:-)

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CB <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:
> Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
> textures?

http://www.students.tut.fi/~warp/povQandT/filesQandT.html#povtootherformatsdifficulty

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 11:17:30 +0100, "CB" <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:
> > It looks
> > like this can't be done effectively in POVray
>
> BTW, I wrote the previous message before noticing your latest 2 replies in
> the previous thread, which I will investigate!

For examples of camera movement look at
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2003-01-15/bobsled.mpg
http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/anims/2002-04-15/oldmrr.mpg
In the next MegaPOV there will be another types of splines available which can
result with more interesting paths.

ABX

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:3ea7bfa6@news.povray.org...
> CB <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:
> > Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
> > textures?
>
>
http://www.students.tut.fi/~warp/povQandT/filesQandT.html#povtootherformatsd
ifficulty
>

Thanks for that link. Yes, the POVray scripting language has grown over the
years and I can see the problems here.

My model is simply constructed from a list of explicitly defined primitives,
so there is no looping or anything like that. In this case the problem would
be converting the POV primitives to triangle meshes. I had wondered if a
utility existed to do this, but I do agree that for the more general case it
would be even more difficult.

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On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:05:48 +0100, "CB" <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:

>I have a model built from various POV primitives and I would like to export
>it to another 3D package - possible the free version of Truespace.
>
>Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
>textures?
>
Thomas Baier has written a few utilities to do this with early versions of Pov.
You might be lucky.
http://www.tb-software.com/products.html

Regards
        Stephen

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<mca### [at] aolcom (S McAvoy)> wrote in message
news:3ea7caa0.47156327@news.povray.org...
> >Can POV objects be "converted" to, say, DXF meshes together with the
> >textures?
> >
> Thomas Baier has written a few utilities to do this with early versions of
Pov.
> You might be lucky.
> http://www.tb-software.com/products.html
>

Thanks Steven. Looks promising. This page lists POVRAY 3.5 and MORAY formats
supported:

http://www.tb-software.com/format_info.html

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On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 13:01:25 +0100, "CB" <col### [at] nospamcouk> wrote:


>
>Thanks Steven. Looks promising. This page lists POVRAY 3.5 and MORAY formats
>supported:
>
If you don't have Moray, it can export UDO and RIB files. I've not tried it
though.
Regards
        Stephen

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