KIO-POV 0.2 review

KIO-POV is a KDE IO-Slave for the Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray). It provides an easy-to-use interface to POV-Ray for r

License: BSD License File size: 0K Developer: Christoph Hormann

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KIO-POV is a KDE IO-Slave for the Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray).

It provides an easy-to-use interface to POV-Ray for rendering scenes, viewing render results, render logs and information about POV-Ray files. For example if you want to render the scene /usr/local/share/povray-3.6/scenes/advanced/biscuit.pov (which comes with POV-Ray) you just open:

pov:/usr/local/share/povray-3.6/scenes/advanced/biscuit.pov?render

in konqueror (or in a KDE image editor if you want to edit the image) and you get the image rendered by POV-Ray.

Render results are cached so when you access the same render twice without modifying the scene you will not have to wait for the render to finish again.

Apart from the basic rendering mode which returns a PNG image you can also access information summaries about the scene in HTML form (see screenshot) and view the log file of the render. If POV-Ray reports errors while processing the scene the error message will be shown as well.

KIO-POV also supports MegaPOV. MegaPOV scenes are automatically rendered with MegaPOV if it is installed.

Note KIO-POV requires POV-Ray 3.6 or 3.6.1 to function properly. It is strongly recommended to install the latest official version from the POV-Ray website (both the source and the binary version will work).

If you want to report bugs in KIO-POV or otherwise want to contact me about it you can do so via the povray.tools.general newsgroup on the POV-Ray newsserver. For KDE-related questions the KDE mailing lists will also be helpful.

What's New in This Release:
adding animation support (using ffmpeg)
adding inline render previews in the file information pages
fixing various bugs