POVRay rendering script

Question

I have to make a simple animation for an assignment and don't have access to the POVRay GUI (which I believe can possibly make animations much more simple). So what I want to do is render multiple images overnight on one of the uni machines.

The problem is that once an image is rendered, the command line asks you to click on the render window to "exit". I tried running the following script last night and it seemed to stop after the first image. I can only assume it's because of the aforementioned issue.

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..16}
do
    povray picture$i.pov +FN
done

Anyone have any suggestions about how to make it keep rendering all 16 images?

Answer 1

One idea is to run all the commands in the background (povray ... &) and go click on the GUI windows yourself in the morning.

A cleaner solution if it exists is to find a way to tell povray to run in batch mode and not require user interaction. A quick glance through the documentation from their website suggests that -P may be a useful switch to add.