Scene File Organization

As an amateur animator you will be doing most if not all of the modeling, and essentially all of the scene development, animation, and animation tests for your work. As you're starting out your animation will be on the low end of the ambition scale, you won't have too many POV-Ray scripts, and because you know where everything is you'll be tempted to keep everything in one folder.

I'm going to modify this tendency with a few small advisos so that you can establish good habits that will avoid trouble in the future, when your animations get more ambitious.

Initial Installation

When you first install POV-Ray and run POV-Ray it will create a folder named POV-Ray in your Documents folder, and within that folder it will create a sub-folder named after the installed version of POV-Ray (this will be v3.7 as of this writing). Inside this folder you will find all of the other data files that POV-Ray installs for your convenience. This folder in turn has the following sub-folders:

include: This contains model and texture examples.

ini: This contains files which specify the command-line settings for rendering different scene types.

Insert Menu: This contains files with snippets of code and icons for POV-Ray's editor's insert menu feature.

scenes: This contains sample scenes.

When you begin an animation project, you should create a sub-folder within scenes, named according to your project, and within that you should create a sub-folder for holding the rendered frames (you can call it frames or images). This will allow everything that is specific to your project to reside in one folder.

File types

As you work on your projects, you will find that your files will fall into the following categories:

Model Files

These are the script files which create some scene-level geometry (that is, stuff that shows up in an image). They can define simple models (like a table or a vase), or complex models (like a tree, a Ferris Wheel, or an animated character). You should have a separate file for each model that you create for your animations, and you should at you keep them in the include folder and invoke them from your scene file as necessary. This will ensure that you can always find them when you want them.

Texture and Macro Files

You will find yourself wanting to re-use the textures and macro files that you create, and the include folder is as good a place as any for keeping them.

Scene Files

These are files that set up a single scene for rendering. You should put all of these files into the folder you have set aside for the project. I generally have one main .POV file which takes care of things that have to be done in every shot, and have an #include statement to invoke the script file for the specific scene. More on this in a later post.

INI Files

These files each contain the command-line settings required to run POV-Ray for all of the different renders that take place during the course of a project:

One file, usually named still.ini to make test stills, which I edit to produce the specific test image needed for whatever I'm working on;

Another file, usually named anim.ini for making short animation tests (generally at a lower resolution than still tests);

One file for each shot in the animation, named shot####.ini, which contains the settings for that shot's final render.

Image files

Not only will you have the images from the final rendering, you will also have images from tests as well as image files used for texturing and compositing. Within the folder for each project you should create a folder named images for images rendered as part of the project, and configure the .ini files so that image files are written there. The files that are used for textures should go into a folder within the include folder.

Project Archive

One benefit of organizing your files as I recommend above is that you only need to zip the include folder and the folder for your animation project, and you'll have a neat package that can be quickly set up if you return to the project later, or you are working on a new machine.