POVRAY output for DINO
======================

---------------------------------------------------------------------

THERE IS AN UPDATED VERSION OF THIS TUTORIAL ON THE DINO HOMEPAGE

http://www.bioz.unibas.ch/~xray/dino/tutorials/pov  (09 Sep 1999)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

POV-ray is a powerful raytracer and can handle huge scenes very well. Its syntax
is relatively easy to learn and extremely nice pictures can be generated with
it. For more information, downloads and galleries check out the official
homepage at http://www.povray.org

DINO version 0.7.5 introduces POV-ray output. Simply issue the command

write file.pov

and the current scene will be written into two files: file.pov and file.inc.

In file.inc, the objects themselves (coordinates, normals, colors, etc) are
stored. This file can become large easily since its all text definitons, but it
compresses well with gzip.
The other, file.pov, is the 'frontend' to the .inc file and is meant to be
user-editable. It is used to start the rendering process as follows:

povray +I file.pov

with further options appended. The .inc file is automatically included.

The .pov file first specifies the camera position, then the light sources,
optionally a depth-cueing plane, the material and/or transparency definitions
for the objects in the .inc file (specified as variables) and finally the
inclusion of file.inc.
The min and max boundaries of the scene are given as a comment in order to allow
the user to place bounding objects, e.g. planes, walls etc to his taste.


NOTES: 

The objects are transformed by the transformation matrix before being written  
out, so the center of the POV-ray scene is <0,0,0>. 


PROBLEMS: 

There is as yet no way to specify smoothly colored triangles in POV-ray. I have 
written a little patch, but I am trying to incorporate it into a newer version
of POV-ray, which is supposed to have other patches merged in as well. 
A workaround exists in form of a macro (provided by Chris Colefax). Use the flag
"-smooth" to activate it when writing the POV-ray output. WARNING this macro
eats memory like crazy and makes the parsing really slow. Not thoroughly tested.

Lots of 'degenerate triangle' warnings can occur. Ignore.


PATCH:

the patch for the POV-ray sources than allows smoothly colored triangles can be
found under

http://www.bioz.unibas.ch/~xray/dino/pov/

to use its functionality, append the flag "-new" to the write command

write file.pov -new

THIS PATCH IS LARGELY UNTESTED. Please keep a unpatched version of POV-ray, as
the patch might have broken some normal functionality. Do not post questions
about the patch to the POV-ray newsgroups but to me only. This patch is
currently attempted to be incorporated in a next POV-ray release.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

AP 15 Aug 1999

dino@bioz.unibas.ch

