[povray] command line rendering under windows

[Carsten Friedrich]

Hi,

I donwloaded povray for windows and want to use it to render images in the
background. That is starting povray from a shell (this works) and povray not
opening any windows (including the splash screen and the editor). How can I
achieve this? I didn't find a switch for that. -D only stops the rendering
image from being displayed. The splash screen and the editor are still
displayed.

Thanks,
Carsten

[Ken]

There is a patched version of POV-Ray for Windows called QuietPOV that
does what you want -

http://www.dreampeach.com/QuietPOV/

--
Ken Tyler

[Wlodzimierz ABX Skiba]

"Carsten Friedrich" <fcar...@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message news:<KuS6b.88525$bo1....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>...

If options described in "1.9.1 Special Command-Line Options" chapter
of manual are not enough then look at
http://throwable.com/dreampeach/html/quietpov.html

ABX

[Wlodzimierz ABX Skiba]

Ken <tyle...@pacbell.net> wrote in message news:<3F5C8B63...@pacbell.net>...

> > I donwloaded povray for windows and want to use it to render images in the
> > background. That is starting povray from a shell (this works) and povray not
> > opening any windows (including the splash screen and the editor). How can I
> > achieve this? I didn't find a switch for that. -D only stops the rendering
> > image from being displayed. The splash screen and the editor are still
> > displayed.
>
> There is a patched version of POV-Ray for Windows called QuietPOV

AFAIK it is GUI Extension.

ABX

[Arun Dev]

Hi all

I have a similar problem for some time.

On a Linux/Apache/PHP web server I want to call POVRay from PHP
and send the result direktly to the browser for display.
It still doesn't work. These versions I have tried sofar:

to have a PHP file (say call.php) with the contents
<?php
header("Content-Type: image/png");
passthru("./xxx.cgi");
?>

the xxx.cgi is simply
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/povray +O- myfirst.pov 2> /tmp/errors.txt

Result:
- browser displays "The image http://..../call.php cannot be
displayed, because it contains errors"

- Apache access_log has a status 200 line
"./xxx.cgi: line 2: 27809 segmentation fault"

- /tmp/errors.txt is created but empty.

Executing xxx.cgi on the command line works as expected.

The webserver runs as nobody:nogroup, /tmp is world writable.

I have tried other programs which generate html from the command
line and they work perfectly under this scheme.

POVRay want even write the output to a file, called within
PHP. For example
call.php
--------
<?php exec("./xxx.cgi") ?>

xxx.cgi
-------
#!/usr/bin/perl
$out=`/usr/local/povray +I/tmp/myfirst.pov +O- > /tmp/myfirst.png \
2> /tmp/errors.txt`;

will create *both* /tmp/myfirst.png and errors.txt *but* are
empty :(

Again xxx.cgi works on the command line.

So this has something to do with POVRay. Do you people know
of a patch?

Arun.

[Thorrsten Froehlich]

Arun Dev <nos...@pleaz.xy> wrote in message news:<3f5f38be$1...@news.tiscalinet.ch>...

All you need to do is tell POV-Ray to not output the image to screen.
And of course you have to prevent it from trying to create an X
context. How to do both can be found in the manual and man page.
Alternatively you can recompile POV-Ray without X support.

Of course, it is not really a good idea to run POV-Ray as CGI script
on a public web server should you plan to do so. POV-ray is by no
means designed to provide a completely protected environment for
allowing remote execution.

Thorsten

[Visvanath Ratnaweera]

Hello Thorrsten

Thanks for the reply!

Thorrsten Froehlich wrote:
>
> All you need to do is tell POV-Ray to not output the image to screen.

If you mean -D it had no effect. That is the default under Unix anyway.

> And of course you have to prevent it from trying to create an X
> context. How to do both can be found in the manual and man page.

That I have *not* found out yet.

> Alternatively you can recompile POV-Ray without X support.

Probably the best solution. I'll give a try.

> Of course, it is not really a good idea to run POV-Ray as CGI script
> on a public web server should you plan to do so. POV-ray is by no
> means designed to provide a completely protected environment for
> allowing remote execution.

I know. This is a hobby project of my son. It will run on a (public)
test computer where crashes do not matter very much.

Greets
Arun.

[Visvanath Ratnaweera]

Following up my own mail

Visvanath Ratnaweera wrote:
> Hello Thorrsten

>> Alternatively you can recompile POV-Ray without X support.
>
>
> Probably the best solution. I'll give a try.

Compiling povuni_s.tgz with ./configure --without-x still asks for
all the XFree libraries, which I find odd.

Can somebody confirm this?

Visvanath.

[Visvanath Ratnaweera]

>>> Alternatively you can recompile POV-Ray without X support.
>>

That was the key! Compiled POVRay adding --without-x during configure
and all works :)

Many thanks!

Visvanath

[bhla...@gmail.com]

On Monday, 8 September 2003 13:14:50 UTC+10, Carsten Friedrich wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I donwloaded povray for windows and want to use it to render images in the
> background. That is starting povray from a shell (this works) and povray not
> opening any windows (including the splash screen and the editor).

Has this been achieved?

Or are there any other povray renderers for windows that work from the command line?

Thanks,
Bryan