Comments on POVray techniques

Following up on the comments in the previous post, I should point out that I can optionally apply a grid to any scene. The grid is a series of cylinders, set 5 units apart and centred on the origin of the scene. That gives me an accurate measure of where to put an item. I build the item and rotate it at origin, then move it to the desired location.



The animation (which I may use for a multi-render batch file), briefly, works like this:

"POV-Ray supports an automatically declared floating point variable identified as clock (all lower case). This is the key to making image files that can be automated. In command line operations, the clock variable is set using the +k switch. For example, +k3.4 from the command line would set the value of clock to 3.4. The same could be accomplished from the INI file using Clock=3.4 in an INI file.

If we do not set clock for anything, and the animation loop is not used, the clock variable is still there - it is just set for the default value of 0.0, so it is possible to set up some POV code for the purpose of animation, and still render it as a still picture during the object/world creation stage of our project.

The simplest example of using this to our advantage would be having an object which is travelling at a constant rate, say, along the x-axis. We would have the statement

translate <clock, 0, 0>"