POV Ray is a great rendering tool with support of solids (CSG), can produce high-quality realistic images, by processing scenes, written on SDL - simple and flexible macro-language, and moreover - it's free. At the same time POV Ray has one serious drawback - lack of convenient modelling tools for effective working with objects and scene composing.
This leads me to starting this project - data converter from Cinema4D format to POV's SDL.
cinema2pov - is a command line tool for exporting data from C4D format to POV Ray SDL, code is based on Cineware SDK, now supports following objects:
- Primitives: Sphere, Cube (Box), Cone, Cylinder, Plane, Spline, Mesh (as Mesh2).
- Constructive operations: Extrude (Prism), Sweep (Sphere sweep).
- Boolean (CSG) operations: Union, Difference, Intersection.
- Lights: all POV light sources types are supported.
- Materials: POV materials defined in scenes/pov/include/materials.inc file and linked by C4D materials by name. This library can be easely extended by defining user's own materials, as described here: Materials, Textures, Interior, Finish.
- Other: Null - grouping objects as Union.
Examples
- Splines
To preserve flexibility, exported spline data stored in an array that can be processed by macros,
see examples in 'c4d\export2pov\examples'.
About POV-Ray:
Officail site: povray.org
Documentation: wiki.povray.org
Newsgroups: news.povray.org/groups/
Repository: github.com/POV-Ray/povray
Tutorials:
Basics: https://povlab.online/povtutorial/
Animation: https://povlab.online/animtutorial/
Isosurfaces: https://povlab.online/isotutorial/
Videos: POV-Ray channel on Youtube
Contact me at LinkedIn.