KPovModeler
KPovModeler (KPM) is one of the most complete modelers for POV-Ray available for GNU/Linux.
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 KPM 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 KPM. "Almost" because variables, loop instructions, macros and some operators can't directly be, unfortunately. On the other hand, KPM allows you to include a part of a script with the "Raw POVRAY" tool; such a raw code will only be taken into account by POV-Ray during the rendering stage.
Among the features we could find :
- Management of the scene through a graphical tree.
- Finite solid objects : box, sphere, cone, cylinder, torus, superquadratic ellipsiod, height field, text, blob (spheric and cylinder blobs), prisms, surface of revolution and lathe.
- Objets solides infinis : plan.
- Finite non solid objects : disc, patch, triangular mesh.
- Atmospheric objects : mist, ground mist, sky sphere, rainbow.
- Light objects : point, spot, cylinder.
- Management of CSG : union, difference, intersection, merge.
- Transformations : rotate, scale, translation, matrix.
- Textures, medias (POV-Ray 3.1), normales. Preview of the texture with POV-Ray.
- All the camera types of POV-Ray are available.
- #declare feature for objects (object {...}) declaration and further use in the scene.
- POV-Ray rendering GUI.
- Export/import of the scene in POV-Ray's native format.
- Display of the 4 views, without OpenGL preview.
For modeling an object, it is not required to know POV-Ray's script language. On the other hand, handling the textures is slightly harder because KPM lacks a texture editor like Truevision's: refering to POV-Ray's documentation will be difficult to avoid. Moreover, for some objects like lathes, objects parameters should be typed with the keyboard because the management of the object's shape through the use of the 3d view is not easy.
But to ease the work, it is possible to simply cut-and-paste a script from POV-Ray into KPM. KPM 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 KPM, you could always copy its example from POV-Ray's documentation and experiment with it within KPM.
Apart from these very few flaws, KPM is still one of the best POV-Ray's modelers available on any OS and the future versions will certainly deals with these youth flaws.
Useful information
- Author : Andreas Zehender (zehender_at_kde.org)
![[de]](images/de.png)
![[en]](images/en.png)
- Homepage : kpovmodeler.org
- Tried version : 1.0 (february 2003).
- License : GPL.
- Localization : English.
- Dependencies : at last KDE 3.0.
- POV-Ray versions supported : 3.1
KPovmodeler's GUI
A detailed tree-like view of the scene.
The object's parameters.
The render window.