sgf2pov

Like a number of other people I had a go at rendering a go board with POVRay. The picture shown here was produced in this way.

What I have right now is a script which takes a go board (in SL format) and produces a .pov file which can be used as input for POVRay, which will produce an image file from it. So in particular the name sgf2pov is inadequate at the moment. A future goal would be to produce a movie from an SGF file, instead of an image from a single position.

One feature which may not be very common among similar projects (I didn't really check this, though) is that the stones are placed in a slightly irregular way, in order to make the picture look more natural.

One thing which is not working very well right now is the grid of lines on the go board - the lines look quite ugly. It gets better if one renders the picture at a (much) higher resolution than the target, and rescales with an image editing program like The Gimp - that's how the picture here was produced. If anybody has a hint how to get around this step, I would be grateful.

Finally, let me mention a (much more advanced, as far as I can see) project with roughly the same goal: goboard.inc.

The source code. sgf2pov.py position position.pov position.png
Feel free to use the code as the basis of a project of your own.

Posted by ug on September 7, 2006