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2. Solution

To fulfill the planned, an environment that permits the creation of perfect 3D models is necessary.

The idea is to change the standard clone-modify paradigm to a new one: parametrically describe. The scene designer really needs only to provide the parametric information about the object. Then the computer is able to automatically generate clones of the object according to that parametric information. This scheme enables to create truly mass scenes with vast number of similar objects. Still no two among them will be identical.

The data describing the models should be extensible to keep the information including what and how could be modified in the cloned model, what are the parameters that the model must comply. The scene composition should be easily regulated. The environment should provide fast and acceptable graphic output. Moreover, there is the demand for a cheap availability of the environment. With these requirements on mind, POV-Ray seems to be an ideal platform for our purposes.

2.1 POV-Ray platform

Because the Persistence Of Vision Ray tracer (POV-Ray) is a source-free application, it cannot be cheaper and it cannot have better availability. For modeling it uses the POV-Ray Scene Description Language [3] that is quite general and allows to simply add new attributes, properties, directives, commands or functions. Binaries and sources of POV-Ray can be found and downloaded for free from the Internet [4]. Nevertheless the quality of POV-Ray's graphic output is comparable to the best commercial renderers.

The mass scene creation extensions of the standard scene description language should be divided into two categories: For the first category one helper function (makevalue) and one directive (alternative) have been designed, for the scene composition a new adjustable command (layout) is introduced.

Mass Scenes Rendering Framework, Dušan Bezák, 1999-2001, http://www.ksp.sk/~dushan/dipl/