I've got OpenGL and Povray output for a polymer modeller I wrote a few years back. It models polymer chains constrained in a sphere. The tool has a button 'save image' which generates a povray image.
I can send you the code next week. Translating the view works fine.
I would love to take a look at what you did. If you wouldn't mind me using the code (or some derived from it) in the Avogadro library that would be great. I am also assessing the approach I took to see if there are in fact better ways to do the export. POV-Ray has so many settings and properties you can apply to surfaces!
why don't you give atoms which are further away from the camera a slightly darker shade or mix their color with a bit of light blue. This should simulate athmospheric effects and might strenghten the 3D-impression of the images. This is just an idea, and I have no idea if this works out at all, but I think it might be worth a try.
It would be better to use the tools made available by the POV-Ray developers. The shadows work quite well but it might be beneficial to use multiple light sources, and I think there are effects such as fog that may help in creating the illusion of depth. This is all open source software so anyone is free to alter my settings too. I would certainly commit the changes if I saw a better way of rendering these scenes.
I'm actually working a project to translate fully featured openGL to povray SDL. If you're still having trouble with coordinates, let me know. The biggest issue I saw there when I was working ont hat part was that openGL assumes a right handed coordinate system and POVRAY assumes a left handed coordinate system, had invert the up-vector in povray.
right, a few months late, but if you're still having this problem, turn the vista buffer off. It's used to speedup rendering and is the thing that requires the camera coords to be perpendicular.
Benoit fixed it a while back - it seems to be quite happy now. I do need to add some other functions to the POV-Ray output but the camera stuff is there.