### 9.2.2 Can I convert my POV-Ray scenes to another format?

(Answer by Johannes Hubert)

For POV-Ray 2.2: Try Crossroads (»http://www.europa.com/~keithr/crossroads) or if you want to convert to Moray MDL files, try POV2MDL (»http://www.tb-software.com/) from Thomas Baier.

For POV-Ray 3.1 and newer: There is unfortunately not much you can do. There is no real versatile program yet, that can read (and convert) POV-Ray 3.1 scripts (except for POV-Ray itself :-). Your best shots would be: POV2RIB (»http://www9.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~cnvogelg/pov2rib/index.html) if you want to convert to the RIB format. If you know how to program C++, you can get the ParPov C++ library from the same URL. It is a class-library for reading POV 3.1 scripts and converting them to C++ objects (it also has been used for POV2RIB).

3DWin from Thomas Baier (see the URL above) converts from the POB format to a lot of other formats. POB is a special binary POV-Ray format devised by Thomas and is written by a custom-compile version of POV-Ray 3.0 (get the POB-SDK at the same URL): This POV-Ray version reads POV-scripts and outputs POB files, which can then be converted by 3DWin. The drawback: Although all objects, textures etc. of the scene are in the POB file, they are not all recognized by 3DWin. Only triangles and meshes of triangles are recognized. Everything else in the scene is lost....