Summary

A Perl script which accepts a chess position (in the FEN format) as input and outputs POV-Ray source, which, when rendered by POV-Ray, produces a 3-D view of the chess position.

Pre-requisites

You need to ensure a few things are present on your machine:

  1. The Perl interpreter
  2. Necessary Perl libraries (available from CPAN)
    1. Games::Chess
    2. Switch
  3. A working POV-Ray setup
    1. The POV-Ray engine
    2. POV-Ray colour and texture libraries

Installation

You'll need to extract the archive. You'll find the following:

  1. A README file
  2. Copies of the licenses (GPL version 2, Creative Commons Attribution)
  3. The genpov.pl perl script
  4. Some inc files

POV Generation

The genpov.pl script expects the FEN string as standard input. You'll need an FEN representation of a chess position as input. You can supply it by:

  1. Using a file display program (cat in UNIX) to output the FEN file and pipe this to the script.
  2. Running the script and entering the FEN string at the prompt