LWH's Pro/ENGINEER Corner
ProE to PovRay Converter
Those of You who have ever experimented with the free PovRay Renderer (see www.povray.org), know that it offers far more functionality than the ProE-Photorender tool. (Example)
The only question is: How do I use a ProE model in PovRay?     As there is no feasible geometry object output from ProE, the only possibility is by means of surface information. ProE's output closest to a PovRay facet (triangle) format is the .slp file, which is created by the Interface | Export | Render command. Unfortunately, there is still some conversion necessary.
For single output files this can easily be done with the Rend2Pov windows program.
For assemblies, export and conversion need a little more effort to keep the assembly structure and different part colors intact. This task is performed by two TclTk scripts:
The first script, bom2render.tcl, creates a ProE train file from a bill of material (see the included readme.txt for the proper format), which is then run in ProE to create a set of slp files for each part and subassembly. The second script, rend2pov.tcl, converts these files into a single PovRay include file.     Installation
Using the Delphi program Rend2Pov requires only the extraction of the program from the zip file.     To install the TclTk scripts, You first need to install TclTk Version 8.0 or higher. Look in the links page for a source for Your operating system.    Then follow the instructions given in the readme.txt file.     Download
Finally, here are the programs:   rend2pov.zip, 124 kB  
 bom2pov.zip, 18 kB (ProE 18 and 19) 
 bom2pov2000.zip, 19 kB (ProE 21)     These programs were tested, but are not officially released! If You encounter any problems, please let me know.    IPA by Immersive Design
There is another really great tool available: Immersive Designs IPA Professional 6.0.
It allows direct updating from ProE and sophisticated animations for assemblies. PovRay can be called as (internal) renderer.
See Immersive Design's Site for details and a free evaluation copy.         
© H. Martin, Harald.Martin@LWH-brainware.de last changed 00-08-16