The Shape Machine

TSM - The Shape Machine is an online POV-Ray rendering utility.

New Feature: This whole honking monster is repaired, fixed, and working fine. (1/2008)
Yeah, I know it's been down a few years. Real life, software upgrades, hardware crashes with little $ backup, and various incompatibilities all interfered for a while. But after a few requests to fix it it's finally done. If you notice any bugs or confusion please by all means don't hesitate to email and describe the problem.

New Feature: JPG output (10/2000)

• Until now TSM created only GIFs. Now a JPG is also created. Compression is set to 75%. If the quality is good enough then use the JPG as the file size is usually about 3/4 the size of the equivalent GIF image. (JPG does not support transparent background.)

New Features:

• Elevation: View varies from 'flat,' level with the Background Plane, to 90 degree 'bird's eye view.'
• Background Types: Plane or Sky Sphere. The Sky Sphere was previously the only Background Type available. The Plane Background places a Sphere object on a Plane, and Lights cast shadows.
• Background Plane may have any Texture.
• Several Textures available for Background Sky Sphere.
• Several new Textures added: Glasses, and Starfield.

I Need Help With Help :) One of the difficulties with writing software, and writing the documentation for it, is that the software author (me) is often 'too close' to the software to be able to explain properly how to simply use the software. I write the software, and therefore everything is intuitively obvious to me. TSM is extremenly complex. So, if you have difficulty using TSM, or if what it creates is not what you expected/intended, let me know and I'll see how I can adjust the help pages so they're more understandable.

The way to ask for 'help on help' is 1) Name the Job Number as listed in the Debug section of the page returned to you. 2) Describe how what you expected is not quite what you see in the returned image. You don't need to send me any images, I can find them by way of the Job Number.

Introduction

POV-Ray, the Persistence Of Vision Raytracer, is a very advanced image rendering tool. It's purpose is to create three dimensional graphics images. There are various 'shell' programs that make the whole process a lot easier, but even these have fairly steep learning curves.

The purpose of TSM is to easily create simple objects with complex lighting and surface finish effects. These images may be used for buttons, page dividers, or the basis for further processing such as adding text, or the background for other images.

The learning curve for TSM is fairly short, but you will need to read the help screens to use even the basic functions.

There are two basic operating modes:

Texture

Selecting a standard texture will set all the color and finish options necessary to achieve a given visual effect. Only lighting must be defined.

Basic Plus Advanced Options

In this mode all available POV-Ray options are enabled.

Caveat #1 - Browser Requirements

Due to technical/CGI limitations, an 'HTTP1.1 compatible' browser is required to use TSM. That means minimally Netscape 2, MSIE 3, or similar.

Caveat #2, Horizontal Scrolling

TSM is a Very Large Form page. It may work very poorly for users with 640x480 monitors, requiring a lot of annoying horizontal scrolling. There's not much I can do about that, there is simply so much data that's needed to create an image.

Right now only the Plane and Sphere shapes are available. Enhancements will include cubes, cones, text, animation, and possibly user defined shapes.

So, onward! Please read the help first, then: