About Mondfarilo

What it is

It all starts with POV-Ray. POV-Ray is a Ray Tracer, a program the generates realistic 3D images, or "artificial photographs," of almost anything you can imagine. You write a scene description in a special modelling language, describing the size, shape, location and surface characteristics of all the objects in the scene, the light sources, and the camera. Then you feed the scene description to POV-Ray and wait while it renders your scene.

Then you wait some more.

There, in a nutshell, you have the two reasons why Mondfarilo exists:

Scene descriptions are hard to write.
Ray tracing is very slow.

Mondfarilo, like any Wireframe Modeller, solves both of those problems. It provides an intuitive click-and-drag interface for creating, shaping, sizing and placing a variety of objects, so you don't need to learn the scene description language. And it draws "rough drafts" of your scene very fast, fast enough to change in real time as you drag the mouse, so you don't have to wait minutes or hours to see the results of your changes.

History

Mondfarilo began life as a Macintosh program, written in C++ with Metrowerks Codewarrior and their PowerPlant application framework. This version, currently for a PowerMac running System 7.5, continues to be the main focus of development efforts. Things happen first on the Mac.

But eventually, it all gets ported to Java. It runs as an Applet, which you can play with provided that you visit this site with a Java-capable browser. And it will run as a stand-alone application on any computer that supports the Java Virtual Machine. For example, I develop and test on a Sun workstation running their peculiar variant of Unix.

Design Goals

All object and scene building must be done by easy, natural, touchy-feely mouse manipulations, with typing of numbers into boxes kept to an absolute minimum.
Precise mathematical control must also be available wherever the user needs it.
It must operate directly on POV-Ray primitives in ways that are familiar to POV-Ray users, and it must generate scene descriptions consisting of those same primitives. Modelling operations more complex than POV-Ray can handle directly must be expressed in terms of POV-Ray primitives to the extent possible. The billions-of-triangles syndrom is to be studiously avoided.

About the Name

In inventing the name Mondfarilo I tried to combine a concise description of this program with an affectionate nod to one of my other hobbies: Esperanto.

The name means world making tool. Its derivation is as follows:

mond-: is the root of mondo, a noun meaning world. It rhymes with stoned.
-far-: is the root of fari, a verb meaning to make or to do. It rhymes with car.
-il-: is a suffix denoting a tool suitable for performing the root verb. It rhymes with wheel.
-o: is the nominative singular noun marker. It rhymes with go.

The accent goes on the third syllable: stoned car WHEEL go, Mond-far-IL-o.

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