We're often making 3-D views from data, like this:



I think this one was made in ArcView. We've also used Bryce.

Now, however, we want to make a lot of these (thousands), so we
need to find some software that does a good rendering job but which
is also scriptable (ArcView claims it's scriptable, but it lies, and my
first preference is for something that will run under linux.)

Anyone have any suggestions for good software to do this with?

I use GRASS. http://grass.itc.it A GIS open source software. It has a good 3D tool called NVIZ and it's scriptable.
Let me know if it is good for you.

But now let satisfy my curiosity. You wrote: " We're often making 3-D views from data". Who are you? Could I see your 3-D works? Are they about Mars? MOLA + MGS?
Bye!
Ale.

I'm the head software guy for the Mars Odyssey/THEMIS, Mars Global Surveyor/TES and MER/Mini-TES experiments. Virtually everything on the THEMIS web site and anytime you've seen images from THEMIS in print (National Geographic, Scientific American, Science, Nature, etc) I either processed or wrote the software to process.


We also have literally hundreds of mosaics and 3-D scenes that have never made it to a public release, like these:



We're about to launch a new web site, and one of the features I want to have for it includes automatically generated 3-D movies. We've been making do with home-grown software, along with Bryce and POV. We tried GRASS once a long time ago, but maybe it's time to revisit it. Thanks.

Gorelick:

Welcome aboard!

Bob Shaw

The Digital Pygmalian Project has free software for making 3D models using standard digital camera equiptment.

from the article: "Roberto's work is unique in the world: it's extraordinary to get a fully rotational model from a standard single-lens digital camera."

How it works:

High resolution colour photos of the object in natural light are taken with a standard off-the-shelf camera. The silhouettes and the main interest points on the object are detected automatically in each of the different photos that have been taken. The position of the camera when each photo was taken can then be calculated.

The silhouette and texture in each photo is then used to guide the "digital sculptor" to carve out the 3D shape. An accurate geometry and an accurate depiction of the appearance of an object is achieved automatically. In summary it is a new approach to high quality 3D object reconstruction. Starting from a sequence of colour images, an algorithm is able to reconstruct both the 3D geometry and the texture.

While not necessarily applicable to mars imaging from the rovers, this looks like it would be something that is fun to play with.

except if you own a mac

It seems that there is only a viewer available for download.
Anyway I found Photomodeler Lite that is a old, lighter, free version of www.photomodeler.com. A more complex program for making 3D models.
You could search it with google. There are many links. Here one: http://www.sm.luth.se/~pb/smm00302/apps/PhotoModelerLite/
I've tried it: choosing the corrispondence points is not fast at all but it could work on mars terrain.

There is another interesting software that compute a depthmap from stereopairs: Depthmap creator.
Me and dilo have tried it on navcam images.. really really bad results.
http://www.3dphotopro.com/soft/depthmap/help.htm

If somebody of you would have any results or suggestions.. please post here!