5.3.6 Rendering the Sample Scenes

POV-Ray for Unix comes with a set of shell scripts to automatically render the sample scenes coming with POV-Ray.

These shell scripts are usually installed in /usr/local/share/povray-3.6/scripts. They require a bash compatible shell. There are three scripts that are supposed to be called by the user.

• allscene.sh:

  renders all stills. The syntax is:

  allscene.sh [log] [all] [-d scene_directory] [-o output_directory] [-h html_file]

  If html_file is specified a HTML listing of the rendered scenes is generated. if ImageMagick is installed the listing will also contain thumbnails of the rendered images.

• allanim.sh:

  renders all animations. The syntax is:

  allanim.sh [log] [-d scene_directory] [-o output_directory] [-h html_file]

  If ffmpeg is installed the script will compile mpeg files from the rendered animations.

• portfolio.sh:

  renders the portfolio. The syntax is:

  portfolio.sh [log] [-d scene_directory] [-o output_directory]

  The portfolio is a collection of images illustrating the POV-Ray features and include files coming with the package.

If the option log is specified, a log file with the complete text output from POV-Ray is written (filename log.txt)

If scene_directory is specified, the sample scenes in this directory are rendered, otherwise the scene directory is determined form the main povray ini file (usually /usr/local/share/povray-3.6/scenes).

If output_directory is specified, all images are written to this directory; if it is not specified the images are written into the scene file directories. If the directories are not writable, the images are written in the current directory. All other files (html files, thumbnails) are written here as well.

To determine the correct render options the scripts analyze the beginning of the scene files. They search for a comment of the form

// -w320 -h240 +a0.3

in the first 50 lines of the scene. The animation script possibly also uses an INI file with the same basename as the scene file. The allscene.sh has the additional all option which - if specified - renders also scenes without such an options comment (using default options then).