Structure Synth is now able to export boxes to Sunflow. That was actually a lot harder than spheres.
Sunflow has some amazing global illumination lightning, but why doesn’t it have a ‘box’ primitive in its scene graph language? I mean, it has Banchoff Surfaces, tori and teapots, but not a simple box?
By the way, for those who really dig boxes, check out the Flickr Boxclub (a few Structure Synth creations may also be spotted there).
Creating a reasonable way of exporting Structure Synth objects to other renderers, like Sunflow and POV-Ray turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Not because they have complicated scene description languages - they don’t - but because there are a lot of settings and parameters, and I do not want to wrap and support every single one of them.
The approach I came up with is quite simple - it is now possible to define a number of rendering templates which are XML-files containing a number of text fragments, one for each of the primitives (box, sphere, …) and a ’start’ and ‘end’ fragment.
For instance, a fragment (for a Sunflow exporter) for the ’sphere’ primitive could look like this:
object {
shader "s05"
type sphere
c {cx} {cy} {cz}
r {rad}
}
where the center and radius parameters would be substituted for each instance of the primitive.