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Introduction

KPovModeler is a modeling and composition program for creating POV-Ray(TM) 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.

Among the features you can find :

  • 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.

 
Looking for new Maintainer
Saturday, 05 July 2008 13:55

As you may have noticed, there is no active development on kpovmodeler for a while now. My spare time was hardly enough to make the porting to KDE 4, but that was successfully finished in time for the KDE 4.0 release.

Now I'm looking for a skilled KDE developer with some knowledge in povray and 3D stuff, who will follow future KDE technology changes and keep kpovmodeler compilable and stable. The current state of the program is good, it compiles and runs without any problems against the latest KDE 4.1 Beta 2.

I will still support you, but decisions and maintainership will be taken over by you. The homepage will still be hosted by me, but since it is a cms installation, you will be able to change contents, too.

kpovmodeler has a very clean and extendable framework, so you should be able to understand the program in short time. Some new features like scripting and animation support are partly prepared, so I'd be happy if those features could be finished.

If you are interested please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   with a short description of you person and your experience with KDE/Qt programming

 
Source Release for KDE 4.x
Saturday, 05 July 2008 13:53
Sadly, not all distributions include the releases of the kde-extragear/graphics collection. For those who miss kpovmodeler in their distribution in KDE 4, go to the download section and download the latest source release for KDE 4