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:
One object creation - parametric description of a 3D model.
Scene composition - the layout of the objects into the scene.
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.