POVray implementation in STRUVIR

by Mark Koennecke - July, 1996

I have added output for the Povray raytracer to Struvir. After running struvir there will be an file "struplo.pov" in your directory which contains your crystal structure ready to be rendered with povray. Please understand the limitations: struvir can provide you with a convenient way to get crystal structures into povray but cannot make a art of it. Creating artwork from struvir's output is up to you.

The file you will get contains:

• A set of declare statements, one for any of the 20 struvir colors each. Polyhedra use these declares as their texture information. The distribution of the textures on the polyhedra follows the same rules as colours in struvir. That is: if a polyhedron has color 1 in struvir it has texture declare one in the file etc. This way you can modify the texture information of whole groups of polyhedra by just modifying those declare statements. Please note that povray seems to be unable to cope with mutiple levels of declare. I.e. if you want to use one of povrays predefined textures you'll better copy the definition text from the include file into the declare statement.
• After this you'll find a default light source and a default camera, looking down z, some distance from the crystal.
• Following this, the polyhedra are given. Each one as a union consisting of several triangles.
• At the end of the file all the spheres are given.

Just a tip: if you want to move or scale your complete crystal structure in your scene enclose the whole polyhedron and spheres bit with a union and specify the necessary transforms at the end.

Povray output is for povray-2.2 as at the time of writing povray-3.0 is not yet available on a unix. I tested the povray stuff with most of the example .dat files provided by Armel and got reasonable pictures. However as usual:

NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND ARE GIVEN. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN WITH THIS.

Warning: Neither struvir, nor povray are programs for the either crystallographically or computationally challenged!

Enjoy,
Mark Koennecke
Mark.Koennecke@psi.ch