vtk2pov a command line converter for converting from VTK polydata to POVRay mesh2. Input surface is triangulated and it can optionally be subdivided using linear, loop or butterfly filter, and normals can be optionally generated, or removed.
Building is done through cmake + make
mkdir bin
cd bin
cmake -DVTK_DIR=<path to VTK> -DENABLE_BOOST=ON ../
make
INstalling is as simple as putting the vtk2pov in your PATH, and ensuring your VTK install is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
The converter may be run from the command line with a number of options set. The --input and --output options are required. Use --help to get a secription of all the options.
There are two options for output, mesh2 and mesh3. mesh2 is povray's format. It's completely ASCII based and hella slow and bloated. mesh3 is a hacked binary format that is orders of magnitude faster and more compact. However mesh3 can only be used with a patched version of povray 3.7.1. The patch is included in vtk2pov patch directory. Patching povary can be done as follows:
cd ${povray_sources}
git checkout 7086fa93080acea
git am -3 ${vtk2pov_sources}/patch/0001-intorudce-mesh3-object.patch
Now recompile and install the patched povray. This will enable mesh3 format and adds timing to both mesh2 and mesh3 parsing.
To run the test execute the command on the included test data and launch povray using the included script.
./bin/vtk2pov --input=./data/cone.pvtp --output=./data/cone.pov --verbose --subdivision=loop --ndivisions=4
povray pov.ini
When large numbers of files need to be converted parallel operation may be necessary. An example of how this is done can be found in driver.py and driver.qsub scripts. On the Cray XC31 at NERSC submit the job as follows:
qsub -V -A mpccc -q premium -l walltime=01:30:00 -l mppwidth=1824 driver.qsub