A New Beginning

It's been a few years since my last post, and in that time I've not done much POV-Ray work of any kind. I've tried my hand with Blender a few times, and each time I went away frustrated because the interface takes a college degree's worth of studying to learn. I ain't got time for that.

It turns out that Blender has an entirely separate interface: Script files.

My reasons for jumping ship are two-fold. First, POV-Ray is based on a rendering approach that does not incorporate the advances in rendering that have taken place in the past thirty years (with the exception that if the system has a multi-core CPU, POV-Ray will make use of it). Second, POV-Ray is not well-designed for modelling organic shapes, unless those shapes are amenable to procedural generation; but if you want to make realistic-looking humans or animals, you're out of luck.

As a long-time POV-Ray scripter (30 years), I expect that a lot of the skills I developed for POV-Ray will carry over without any difficulty, but there are some other features of POV-Ray which have no equivalent in Blender. This is really to be expected; POV-Ray began as a hobbyist's project, and its primary user base has always consisted of hobbyists. More importantly it was designed for much lower-power machines, with the expectation that speed would be sacrified for quality. It may take longer for a sphere to render in POV-Ray than in Blender, but a POV-Ray sphere is a perfect geometric sphere, and not (as in Blender) a polyhedron mesh with a high polygon count. I've been led to know that I will very likely miss POV-Ray's constructive solid geometry feature.

Anyway, keep reading to learn more about this journey.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Your First Blender Script

Image
For this series I will present a script, walk through it line-by-line, display the results, and then include the full script. Import the libraries import bpy import math import mathutils import os Each of these statements imports one of the python scripts that are needed for what follows. bpy accesses all of the Blender libraries. math and mathutils provide access to a pair of math libraries. os is a wrapper for your operating system. Reset the environment bpy.ops.wm.read_factory_settings(use_empty=True) This statement sets the environment back to the "factory defaults" so that we can safely assume what the environmental settings are. Create the materials In Blender terminology, a material is an object which defines the color, reflectivity, etc. of an object and also selects the code which will be used for rendering these properties. The bits of code which do this are called shaders . Here we define a function that creates a single material object, bestows ...
Read more

Getting Started with Blender Scripting

Installation Blender, like many applications, requires that it be downloaded and installed. Easy enough. The latest version is always freely available at www.blender.org . Just follow the links. While installing Blender, be sure to note the installation folder so that you can add it to the system path later. Add Blender's folder to your PATH variable Once you have downloaded and installed Blender, you will need to add it to your environmental path. I found perfectly useful instructions for Windows here . Add the installation folder for Blender here. Test the installation Once you have done this, open up a command prompt and change directory to your Documents folder. This will usually be as easy as cd Documents . Enter the command blender -b -P dummy.py Be sure that -b is lower case and that -P is upper case. If this results in an error that the file dummy.py could not be found, everything is working correctly and you can go on to the next article. If you get any other err...
Read more

Using ffmpeg

ffmpeg is a utility that can manipulate audio and video files in a large number of ways. For animators, its primary use is to take still images and generate a video file from them. There are some GUI video encoders that are a GUI front end bundled with ffmpeg, but ffmpeg is a command-line utility. I'll describe the command line options that I use when making my animations. As I've said in earlier posts, I am not yet working with sound in my animations, and so I haven't explored the options required for including sound in a video file. The command line I use a .BAT file to run ffmpeg, to avoid having to type out the same command line over and over. Here is the command line that I use for creating the final animation from all of the sets of generated frame files: "C:\Program Files\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg" -f concat -safe 0 -i framelist.txt -r 24 -y -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p final.mp4 Here is what each term does, in order of its appearance in the command line: ...
Read more