anyone know of a good spline editor for Linux?

[Syrinx]

I'm trying to learn to use POV-Ray effectively. My latest roadblock is understanding the different type of splines. It would be cool if I could play around with them interactively.

I mainly want such a program as a learning tool, but it would also be extra cool if I could export lathe and prism POVRay objects from it.

Anyone know of such a beast?

Thanks!

[TheBaldyMan]

1. Gimp has a 'wobbly line' brush that uses splines.

Have you tried http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Spline.html">Wolfram Technologies site or Google another site for introductory info on splines and curves? The mathematics is done quite quickly by computer but the actual mathematics can be neuron shredding.

The idea of fitting a curve to a set of data points is really easy to understand if you can see an animation and then play about with something like Gimp. You might not fully comprehend the underlying mathematics but should have an idea of the process.

[Syrinx]

2. sorry for the delay in replying

Thanks for the reply.

How do I find the "wobbly line" brush? My version of the Gimp is probably a bit old. It's 2.2.9.

Thanks TheBaldyMan!

[qnr]

3. You might also try k3d or kludge3d

http://k3d.sourceforge.net
http://kludge3d.sourceforge.net

[Syrinx]

6. that k3d thing looks interesting

From the name, I assumed it required KDE, but that doesn't look to be the case.

A new toy to play with! :)

[meldroc]

4. For graphics editing, I'd also recommend Blender and Wings3D.

KDE has a program called kpovmodeler, though I've found it to be relatively painful to use.

Blender is a pretty comprehensive modeling and rendering program, which has a huge number of bells and whistles. The modeling system has curves (I believe Blender does Bezier curves and NURBS curves rather than straight splines,) among its many bells and whistles. You should be able to mark a few points and lines on the screen and generate curves that way.

Wings3D is another program I personally liked. It actually focuses on modeling, and relies on other programs (I do believe POV-Ray is supported, as is Blender and others) for rendering. Wings3D focuses on helping the user build edge loops to subdivide the model, then lets the users manipulate vertices in the edge loops to adjust the shape, then continually subdivide to create more loops and add detail. Just playing around with it a few days myself (and I'm not much of a trained artist), I was able to build a few cool spaceship models.

[meldroc]

5. Another thought: Try Gnuplot

It's a command-line program designed for plotting graphs and such. IIRC, it does include several different types of splines as smoothing functions, so you could put together a few points, and have gnuplot make some graphs with different spline algorithms just so you can see what they do.

[Syrinx]

7. I didn't think of that

Thanks!