PovRay is a ray tracing package for creating graphics with accurate perspective and lighting. I first encountered it in November 2013 and was hooked.
I had already been creating animations to explain the workings of the MAIT system using the very limited animation facilities provided by the CAD package Pro-Desktop (now discontinued). I have a longish term project to create a striking new home page for the MAIT web site which would include some animated graphics intended to convey the underlying idea of MAIT. These would show mechanically correct movements of the transport components.
I have already produced this sort of thing with Pro-Desktop but the lighting effects available are very primitive, and the perspective views has bugs. I would also like to include rudimentary scale figures to give a correct idea of scale and boarding and alighting.PovRay provides accurate perspective and all the lighting effects I could possibly want. Scenes are created by a script which allows movements to be determined by equations of motion and is the approach that I have been used to.
PovRay is open source and has an active and very helpful user group.
Crowd
There are a lot of ready-made scripts for various objects including human figure, but this seemed to be far more sophisticated than I needed. I had already started thinking how I might create and deploy some extremely crude figures with Pro-Desktop, so I decided to carry this on with PovRay with a project I called Crowd
Rounded objects
In the process of developing the figures for Crowd I found it is difficult to produce smoothly rounded shapes. This is inherent in the normal way in which objects are assembled in PovRay using CGS. I thought of a way to overcome this and have posted pages describing how this works. So far there is:
Tweek Colours
Another subproject is Tweek Colours
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