I just found Wings 3D, and it's exactly what I want in a modeler. I have two
questions though.

1. When I export to POV-Ray format, the view, when rendered, is all askew, and
things are out of proportion.

And

2. What is the best way to do textures? Should I make a texture in Wings 3D, and
then export to POV-Ray? Or should I just edit the textures in POV-Ray? And what
is the best way of doing both of those?

Thanks!!

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"John" <afu### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I just found Wings 3D, and it's exactly what I want in a modeler. I have two
> questions though.

I've found it very useful.  I found it much easier to pick up than Blender,
which I never really got the hang of.

> 1. When I export to POV-Ray format, the view, when rendered, is all askew, and
> things are out of proportion.

My advice would be to ditch all the light and camera settings.  The mesh should
be there, and in most cases that's probably all you're interested in.  (I
usually just export it as a .obj file and convert it with a script, but there's
no need to go that far now that POV-Ray export is included.)

> 2. What is the best way to do textures? Should I make a texture in Wings 3D, and
> then export to POV-Ray? Or should I just edit the textures in POV-Ray? And what
> is the best way of doing both of those?

If a procedural texture in POV-Ray works fine, then there's no problem.  Just
texture it like you would any other object.  If you want it uv-mapped, then you
can set that up in Wings3D and export it with uv-vectors included.  I think that
just amounts to a checkbox somewhere in the export dialog.  Then you just add
the uv_mapping keyword in POV-Ray along with an image_map and you should be all
set.  I usually go to the outliner dialog in Wings3D and make the image external
so I can edit it, reload the image, and see the changes without actually
exporting to POV-Ray.

I hope that helps a little bit.  I've never really found good documentation for
Wings3D, but most of the features are pretty easy to guess.

 - Ricky

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"John" <afu### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I just found Wings 3D, and it's exactly what I want in a modeler. I have two
> questions though.
>
> 1. When I export to POV-Ray format, the view, when rendered, is all askew, and
> things are out of proportion.
>
> And
>
> 2. What is the best way to do textures? Should I make a texture in Wings 3D, and
> then export to POV-Ray? Or should I just edit the textures in POV-Ray? And what
> is the best way of doing both of those?
>
> Thanks!!

I absolutely love Wings as a modeling tool, but it can be a little funky at
times.  I tend not to use the scene it generates during export.  Instead, I
make the exported scene into an include, declare the meshes as objects, and
build my scene correctly around them using my own camera and light source
settings.  If you do decide to use the Wings generated scene, be aware of its
quirks (note that I am using an older version):

Light sources do not have a comma between the Y component and Z component of the
location.  This is acceptable to POV-ray without a warning, unfortunately, as it
leads to things like <1.2345, 5.6789 - 0.1234> being incorrectly interpreted as
a 2 component vector. This only happens with the light_source (to my
knowledge).

As for textures, I generally do it in POV if I am using procedural textures.
For image maps, UV mapping can be done in Wings.  However, beware that using UV
mapping but not putting all of the faces in a UV chart can make the exporter
fail.  Also, look out for the way Wings textures use the ambient part of the
finish - it usually uses ambient 1, but drops the ambient_light param in the
global_settings.

Handedness - Wings uses the right hand system (i.e. the +z-axis points away from
the screen, where as POV expects it to point towards the screen.  Either flip
your items on export, flip them in POV, or change the camera right vector.

As for best, I'd say whatever is easiest and suits your purposes.

-Reactor

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John schrieb:

> 1. When I export to POV-Ray format, the view, when rendered, is all askew, and
> things are out of proportion.

Maybe Wings presumes a different aspect ratio than what you're using for 
rendering.

> 2. What is the best way to do textures? Should I make a texture in Wings 3D, and
> then export to POV-Ray? Or should I just edit the textures in POV-Ray? And what
> is the best way of doing both of those?

Normally, my workflow is (1) make the models, (2) export them to a 
POV-Ray scene, (3) tweak that scene until I'm happy with it. I do not 
want to go through the exporting process over and over again just to 
tweak some colors, so I'm editing the textures in POV-Ray.

When I was still using Wings to export to POV-Ray, I usually renamed the 
file to be an include file, moved the material defines to my main file 
and changed the include file code so that it would just #define the 
meshes. This way, if I needed to re-export, I could just change the 
newly exported file accordingy, without losing my texture definitions.

Nowadays, I usually export to .obj format and then run it through 
PoseRay, which generates a very nicely separated file structure: A 
geometry include file, a material include file, a scene file and even an 
.ini options file.


P.S.: FYI, there's actually a newsgroup "povray.tools.general" dedicated 
to external tools such as modellers, file converters and what-have-you-nots.

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