KpovModeler 1.1.1 review

KPovModeler is a modeling and composition program for creating POV-Ray scenes in KDE. For most of the modelers, POV-Ray is nothing

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 2751K Developer: Andreas Zehender

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KPovModeler is a modeling and composition program for creating POV-Ray scenes in KDE.

For most of the modelers, POV-Ray is nothing but a rendering engine and they bring a lot of limitations to the innate possibilities of POV-Ray scripted language. This is not the case for KPovModeler which allows you to use all the features of POV-Ray through the translation of POV-Ray language into a graphical tree.

Almost all options of POV-Ray's script language can be used within KPovModeler. "Almost" because variables, loop instructions, macros and some operators can't directly be, unfortunately.

On the other hand, KPovModeler allows you to include a part of a script with the "Raw POV-Ray" tool; such a raw code will only be taken into account by POV-Ray during the rendering stage.

Here are some key features of "KpovModeler":
Management of the scene through a graphical tree.
Object modification with control points in a graphical view or direct manipulation of object attributes in a dialog
Nonblocking scene rendering with OpenGL as wire frame views
Freely configurable view layout with dock widgets
Copy/paste and drag/drop of (a subset of) povray(!) code into and out of the object tree
Undo and redo
Scene rendering and texture preview with povray inside the program
Support for almost all povray objects
Support for all textures
Prototypes (declarations) and references
All projection modes of the camera


For modeling an object, it is not required to know POV-Ray's script language. On the other hand, for creating textures refering to POV-Ray's documentation will be difficult to avoid.

But to ease the work, it is possible to simply cut-and-paste a script from POV-Ray into KPovModeler. KPovModeler will then, if the script only makes use of known primitives, convert the pasted text and include it into the current scene.

In other words, if you don't know how to create an object or an effect with KPovModeler, you could always copy its example from POV-Ray's documentation and experiment with it within KPovModeler.