Long story short, I found a 3D mesh model of a car -- it's in the .3ds and
...mesh formats and it needs to be rendered with decent textures and
pigments, etc.  My system is based on FC2 and RH 9 GNU/Linux, though I also
have access to W98.

For starters I loaded the .3ds model file into PoseRay, flipped it around to
get a top view and exported to both .pov and .obj formats.  I don't know
whether the 3ds file had any color/texture/lighting/scene info or whether
it is just the mesh info but the .pov files that PoseRay exported had the
entire car rendered with the same material (a simple pigment of some shiny
gray color) and a single default light attached to the camera.

In the geometry menu of PoseRay I stumbled upon the button that breaks the
single unified object down into its parts (glass, bumper, hood, etc.) and I
think that I figured out how to assign single colors to different parts
(not sure if they qualify as actual 'objects' or not).

The current stumbling block is that when I try to assign a pattern
(Rusty_Iron) to a part (e.g., hood) to make it look beat up, it renders in
a single color (the lowest value color in the color map for Rusty_Iron,
fwiw).

It should be mentioned that PoseRay exports the image file in four different
parts (probably nicely modularized for advanced users) and in the process
increases the complexity of the syntax to the point that I am unable to
decipher it.  A beginner's tutorial it's not.

I've spent the last couple of days immersing myself in 3D and Povray but I
have not been able to crack this one.  Either I'm missing something
obvious, or PoseRay sets a default that causes the texture to render as a
single color, or something.  In running through a few tutorials I've gotten
rendered a couple of demos with the Rusty_Iron texture so it isn't a
hardware or installation problem.

Can anyone clue me in on this?  I'd be happy to post any of the relevant
....pov, pov.ini, pov.inc or pov_mat.inc files if that would help.


Thanks,

Barton

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