Povray Color Map Editor

Deze pagina is in het Engels: als je Povray aankan, kan je ook Engels aan...

colormap.pl is a small script intended to ease the creation and modification of Povray colors and color maps. The script is written in Perl/Tk, allowing execution on any platform supporting this scripting language. There is a number of more extensive editors for Povray, including texture editting etc, however they are either Povray version dependent (not supporting 3.5), not freeware, not for every platform, or not very convenient in the way they handle colors. So I decided to combine some existing Perl/Tk widgets into a color map editor. Limited, but simple. And should run on any platform supporting Perl/Tk, such as Windows, Linux, UNIX, etc.

colormap.pl can handle two types of color information:

• colors: create and maintain 8 element-lists of colors, each which can be used as an independent color in Povray scripts.
• color maps: structures describing 8-color coloring schemes for Povray color maps

To give an impression of the basic interface: see the below image (with added remarks in red):

Next to this main window, a color selector is activated, to edit the current color (color 3 in the above screen shot). Use this to change colors, and next press the 'Apply background Color' button to copy it back to the main window (sorry for the button name, this is just an existing Perl/Tk widget which I did not change, maybe I clean it one day). To edit an other color, just click the button to select. Note that in that case, the color in the color chooser does not change (to ease re-use in other color numbers). To copy a color from one of the 8 color buttons to the chooser, double-click.

Colors can be defined in various color spaces, such as rgb (red/green/blue), hsb (hue/saturation/brightness) and cmy (cyan/magenta/yellow). Also, support for transparency and filter value per color is supported. Division points between the colors can be shifted to broaden/narrow color bands.

You can save to a text file a set of colors, either as a color map ( as in the above screen shot), or as a list of 8 independent usable colors. Or you can press the 'GetCode' button, as is demonstrated in the above screen shot, and copy and paste the displayed text into your own Povray scene file.

Then later on, you can load a color map or list back into colormap.pl (it will read from the source whether it is a map or a list), modify it, and insert it back into the original location of the file it was loaded from. Color maps and lists can be named, so you can have multiple of them in the same file. If you are running Povray 3.5 on that file, it will notice the change and reload your updated file.

This program is freeware, however if you want to use it, give me an email. If I notice sufficient interest, I might make improvements (at this moment, it fulfills at least my own purposes), such as start Povray to generate a preview, or adding more extensive documentation.

--> Download (perl/Tk script in zip file, 7 kB zipped)

If you do not have .pl files associated with Perl, in order to run the program you need to type: perl colormap.pl