i friend of mine just pointed me out to some neat freeware called poseray which i never heard of before and definitely should be mentioned as a little swiss army knife 3d tool: if you don’t need it for conversion of 3d models, it’s still a very nice 3d model previewer. the uses of poseray are:
- use pov-ray as an alternative renderer
- use 3d models in pov-ray or moray scenes
- setup camera and lights for a pov-ray scene
- subdivide model to improve appearance
- define sharp corners to prevent some programs from oversmoothing the model
- transform a model before importing it into another application
- import models into applications that cannot import some 3d formats
- preview applied maps on a 3d model as they are edited on another application
- 3d model preview
a nice list – worth to take a look at it.