2. The functionality I would like to see is PovRay automatically called to render the exported code - rather than requiring a separate look for the file and call to PovRay. At a practical level, this would provide for a more coherent workflow - looking at what you got and redoing it until you have it as you want to see it. But I don't have the confidence that I could accomplish this sensibly in a crossplatform way, that would fail gracefully, not require config files (where is the pvengine executable?), etc. Any thoughts?
I do know the pov-ray people have been pretty insistent on making sure nobody repackages it in a way you don't see their interface. I think we'd need to wait for the repackaging they are in the midst of.
-Scott David Daniels Scott.Daniels@Acm.Org
I think it's fine to invoke povray from within Python using os.system or some such. Povray remains an independent program with its own identity. I have a pov.py that looks like this, which might give some ideas. But yes, in this version the paths to the pvengine are hardcoded. It'd take some doing (not a lot) to make this more friendly to configure (not my need at this time). But at least I test for which operating system (no Mac option as yet). def render(filename="default.pov"): if os.name == 'linux2': linuxcomm = "povray +V +W640 +H480 +FN16 +AM2 +Q9 +A0.3 +P +L/home/urnerk/include" print "Rendering... (this will take some time)" os.system(linuxcomm+" +I"+filename) if os.name == 'nt': wincomm = '"c:\\program files\\POV-Ray for Windows v3.5\\bin\\pvengine" -V fpp.ini' print "Rendering... (this will take some time)" # os.system(wincomm+" +I"+filename) os.system(wincomm) Note -- the fpp.ini thing shows another way to invoke povray, with all the command line settings pre-saved in a file (which my Python code also happens to write). Kirby