From TORCS to POV-Ray
Years ago, when I found The Open Racing Car Simulator, I was looking for an open source racing game which will let me export the tracks to POV-Ray, so I could render some realistic road traffic scenes.
TORCS looked like a very good candidate, and indeed it was possible to export the geometry to POV-Ray via Blender, but I didn't find any automatic way to get a spline for the track path (so that I could place the cars and camera). I then abandoned the project and started to get addicted to racing with TORCS... it's really fun!
But recently I figured out a way to get the track spline into POV-Ray, via Wings3D. The method is bit convoluted, but consists basically in reducing the track to a single face with hundreds (or thousands) of vertices, which once exported can be transformed easily into an array, and then into a spline.
I still have some problems, but the results are starting to look good ...and there is still a lot of room for improvement. I will be publishing a sort of tutorial with code.... soon, as usual. ;)
WIPS, tests and other images:
