A little interactive POV program

I wrote a little Tcl/Tk program to interactively adjust parameter settings and edit POV ascii files. The application renders in real-time a POV scene and the source file can be edited in a text window. The right mouse button is bound to a popup window that provides templates for the most commonly used objects and source constructs of POV. The rendering can be interactively started and stopped, and parameters such as window size, render size, etc are easily available from dialog windows.

(Clickable pictures)

The main window consists of menubar with toolbar, the main render window and a progress bar.

Once a POV file is loaded, the rendering is a push-button away, with the output on the screen. (source POV file from the example "fractal1.pov" in the "examples/scenes/objects" directory of the POV 3.1 distribution)

The POV file, once loaded, can be edited in a text-object available from the menu. The text window has bindings for mouse buttons that presents a pop-up that have preset POV constructs for regular objects like camera, light, sphere, cylinder, cone, box, plane, and background.

The parameter window contains information that serves as input to the "povray" program, such as size of rendering, location of the povray binary, library path, output quality, anti-alias options, and sampling method.

The preferences window has input for the location of the POV documentation, that comes with the distribution, general sizes for windows, colors, and fonts.

The statistics window provides the same output that comes from running the program from the command line, in terms of rendering time and bit depth for the canvas object.

The rendering of a POV scene is done in real-time, meaning that the rendering is shown in the main canvas as it is being calculated. The progress bar at the bottom of the main window gives the measure of progress of the rendering in precentage. The painting in the window is realized by running "povray" to output the image to STDOUT, and reading the output pipe directly into the canvas. (source POV file "superel1.pov" from the POV 3.1 distribution in the "examples/scenes/objects" directory)

The results of a render can be saved in PPM format using the save window.

The POV documentation, the POV-Ray User's Documentation that comes with the distribution, is connected to a text window for reference of functions and objects, available from the "help" menu button.

A little "about" window showing my affiliation, version number and dates.