render-3d

Wrapper library to help render common 3d file formats.

Requirements

This requires a few things to work.

• For Open SCAD files: Requires Open SCAD
• For the actual rendering, requires POV Ray
• Composer
• stl2pov v3.2.0+ python script, part of stltools)
  • No longer required as of 1.2.0. See issue #4 for details.

Installation

If you are using composer, just add "libre3d/render-3d": "~1.2.0" to the require section, then run composer update.

Or if you do not use composer, clone this repository. Then get composer. Then run composer install from the root folder of this library to install dependencies.

Usage

If you don't already have the composer vendor autoload PHP file included in your project, you will need to include it like:

require 'render-3d/vendor/autoload.php';

That path may need to be adjusted.

Then you will need to initialize the Render3d object and let it know the locations of a few things (note that this is a quick example, there are many options and different ways that files can be rendered using this library):

$render3d = new \Libre3d\Render3d\Render3d();

// this is the working directory, where it will put any files used during the render process, as well as the final
// rendered image.
$render3d->workingDir('/path/to/working/folder/');

// Set paths to the executables on this system
$render3d->executable('openscad', '/path/to/openscad');
$render3d->executable('povray', '/path/to/povray');

try {
	// This will copy in your starting file into the working DIR if you give the full path to the starting file.
	// This will also set the fileType for you.
	$render3d->filename('/path/to/starting/stlfile.stl');

	// Render!  This will do all the necessary conversions as long as the render engine (in this
	// case, the default engine, PovRAY) "knows" how to convert the file into a file it can use for rendering.
	// Note that this is a multi-step process that can be further broken down if you need it to.
	$renderedImagePath = $render3d->render('povray');

	echo "Render successful!  Rendered image will be at $renderedImagePath";
} catch (\Exception $e) {
	echo "Render failed :( Exception: ".$e->getMessage();
}

The main workflow:

• Convert to STL file format (if not starting with an STL file)
• Convert the STL to a POVRay file format.
• Render an image using povray and a common scene template.

Options

The $Render3d->render() method takes an optional second parameter for $options, which is an array of options. You can also set the options before hand calling $Render3d->options(['option1' => 'val1']);

Here are a few options of note:

• buffer This controls what is done with output from the commands run on the command line. The valid values are:
  • Render3d::BUFFER_OFF - Default value. Nothing is displayed and nothing is buffered.
  • Render3d::BUFFER_ON - Buffers the output, and saves so that you can later retrieve it with $Render3d->getBufferAndClean()
  • Render3d::BUFFER_STD_OUT - Sends any output directly to std out (sends to the browser or console)
• width - The width of the rendered image, in pixels. Defaults to 1600
• height - The height of the rendered image, in pixels. Defaults to 1200
• fwrite_buffer_size - integer - Buffer size in bytes, when writing the POV file (and possibly others). Some systems may see better performance with a different buffer size other than the default. Defaults to 8000 (set to 0 for no fwrite buffering)

Version & Changelog

We adhere to the Semantic Versioning Specification (SemVer).

Changelog: We use Github issues and milestones to keep track of changes from version to version. To see what changes were in a specific version, look at the closed issues for the corresponding milestone.

Credit

Origin

This library started out as a port of a bash script, though we mainly took the overall "how it works" and re-wrote most of the fine details. The original page talking about it is no longer around, but luckily we found a cached version on Wayback

You can find the original files still (as of the last time I checked) at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/stl2pov/ - the render.sh is the overall file that does everything.

We took the "idea" of how the shell script did things, and ported it into a PHP library that made system calls. The look of the rendered images was lacking, so the scene's template file was almost completely changed. We found that POVRay has a lot of potential behind it if you take the time to learn how to set up the scene and do a little math to figure out the best camera angle and such.

src/Scenes/axes_macro.inc

Like the bash script, we also stuck to using the AxesAndGridMacro to create a nice grid. We didn't change the inc file but we drastically changed how it was used, it mainly just renders a grid on the floor now. We also made it change the grid size dynamically depending on the size of the model, it will always be in a scale of 10, like 10 mm, 10cm, etc. depending on how large the model is.

stl2pov

Early versions relied on the stl2pov python script. In version 1.2.0 the conversion has been ported into this PHP script.

We want to give a special thanks to the author of stltools, he has been a great help with our quest to port the functionality into PHP by answering our questions in-depth. If you are looking for conversion tools that use Python, we highly recommend stltools.