Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray • Hacker News Board

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#21

Post by TD-Linux » Mon, Dec 01, 2014, 5:47 PM UTC

jdboyd wrote: post #19

virtualritz wrote: post #14

"It may not be as good as Cinema4D or Pixar’s RenderMan, but POV-Ray is free, open-source, and cross-platform." Why not use Aqsis or Pixie or, if you like free but don't mind closed source, 3Delight? All are RenderMan compliant.

The Python library cgkit already supports Aqsis, Pixie, and 3Delight, by the way. Cycles is also free, open source, and cross-platform, and Cycles seems to be both further ahead than either Aqsis or Pixie and moving faster. However, it could use someone to make a Python interface for it.

Blender's Python interface already has complete bindings to Cycles.

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#22

Post by zulko » Mon, Dec 01, 2014, 5:58 PM UTC

dirkk0 wrote: post #20

GrantS wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To follow up with a working example of python via headless blender on the command line, the following 4 lines interactively get me an image of a sphere saved to /tmp/.png ./blender -b --python-console >>> import bpy >>> bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(size=3.0,location=(0,0,0)) >>> bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

Great, thanks! Does this work on a Mac and/or Linux?

I just tested it on Ubuntu, it worked.

My point in the post was more that the embedded Python in Blender isn't really a "binding", it forces you to use Blender's 'internal' Python installation, so you must reinstall all the packages that you need specifically for Blender's Python (I don't know how, but I think there is a way). Also, this makes it impossible to use virtualenv, I guess (not sure).

In short, it would be cool if it just "worked from Python".

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#23

Post by GrantS » Mon, Dec 01, 2014, 5:58 PM UTC

dirkk0 wrote: post #20

GrantS wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To follow up with a working example of python via headless blender on the command line, the following 4 lines interactively get me an image of a sphere saved to /tmp/.png ./blender -b --python-console >>> import bpy >>> bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_uv_sphere_add(size=3.0,location=(0,0,0)) >>> bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

Great, thanks! Does this work on a Mac and/or Linux?

I ran this on a Mac, should work on Linux as well. Since it may not be obvious, the "blender" command line executable is located within the regular Mac OS X Application bundle for blender that you would download from the web:

/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#24

Post by geon » Mon, Dec 01, 2014, 6:21 PM UTC

eudox wrote: post #17

While I love the way POV-Ray (And OpenSCAD, for that matter) does things, it bothers me that its language is more about specifying rendering than describing the objects in the scene. That is, the textual commands directly used for rendering, you can't use POV-Ray's language to define a scene and then export it to some 3D file format, to the best of my knowledge, which can then be rendered somewhere else.

Povray relies heavily on operations on primitives like spheres and cylinders, and uses procedural texturing. That can't easily be efficiently converted to triangles and texture maps.

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#25

Post by yetihehe » Mon, Dec 01, 2014, 6:27 PM UTC

eudox wrote: post #17

While I love the way POV-Ray (And OpenSCAD, for that matter) does things, it bothers me that its language is more about specifying rendering than describing the objects in the scene. That is, the textual commands directly used for rendering, you can't use POV-Ray's language to define a scene and then export it to some 3D file format, to the best of my knowledge, which can then be rendered somewhere else.

It's hard to port scripting language to "just" data file. Povray's scene description language is so much more versatile (if's, cases, loops, imports...).

Re: Things You Can Do with Python and POV-Ray

#26

Post by morcheeba » Mon, Dec 01, 2014, 7:21 PM UTC

ticviking wrote: post #13

zeeshanm wrote: post #9

POV-ray is cool. I remember first using it back in high school when one of my friends introduced me to it. Back in the day, it was a total blessing for me as using a 3D modeling software would COMPLETELY slow down my Intel Celeron powered PC. :-) Now, this tutorial gives me a good excuse to try out POV-ray once again...

You had a celeron, sounds like you were spoiled. :P I had my dads old 486 to play with POV-ray on. I remember getting up at 5 am to work on a scene and come back from school to see if it had rendered right. Do homework tweak and hit render just before bed. If I was lucky I'd finish something cool once a month or so.

I started with POVray on a 486... then I had a big animation to do, so I wrote a primitive filesystem-based job scheduler. I used 13 office computers (P60 or P66) working in parallel to get a 30-second animation done in only a weekend. I think it was about 2 hours rendering/frame.