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No, for illustrative purposes of what ray tracing is capable of you have to look at something like this, it's very very close to being indistinguishable from a photo. That took 21 hours on a P2-350 (465 MFlops) so on a GTX280 which is ~3,000 times faster it would take about 45 seconds to render, not exactly a playable framerate. We're a few doubling of transistor count away from being able to do photo-realistic ray-tracing at playable framerates.

His artwork is great, much of it done with POV-Ray. He's got a zazzle page here. His website is pretty fascinating as well.

For those interested in real-time raytracing, the latest beta version of POV-Ray has a neat (but experimental) RTR feature. The source is now available for Windows and Unix/Linux. There also demo scenes available (and another demo scene with pre-baked textures can be found here).

It's been traditional for POV-Ray users to create images entirely by code. That was the case for instance of this image that won the POVCOMP competition in 2004: most objects, including very complex ones, were made using isosurfaces, that are basically function-based objects. Scenes like this one and this one were also written in POV-Ray code, and the source is available.

It's been traditional for POV-Ray users to create images entirely by code. That was the case for instance of this image that won the POVCOMP competition in 2004: most objects, including very complex ones, were made using isosurfaces, that are basically function-based objects. Scenes like this one and this one were also written in POV-Ray code, and the source is available.

Umm. You do realize how much time Radiosity, Photons and all the rest of that stuff takes right? Probably not, since your 'modern' ones all cheat even when doing that. And for your information:

Povray's most recent features - Isosurfaces, Radiosity and Photons. A mess of new dispersion settings and other tricks for interiors and media and other additions.

And the latest version is being completely redone to support dual core processors and systems with multiple processors. However, radiosity and photons take a 'lot' of time to render, so without the graphics card cheats that your so called 'modern' programs use, it would exceed the time limit of the competition. Most of the stuff on the sites you talk about the designers had effectively unlimited time. 4.0 is going to be more than a hack to support processors though, but a complete rewrite of much of the code to optimize all the 'old' stuff you complain about. There are not many really astounding POVRay artists. This is one:

http://www.oyonale.com/histoire/english/index.htm

His 'family' image (2003 images), both the night and day version are insane with details and he even made a panarama of it you can look around in. In fact, a lot have 360 degree panaramas and I am sure you can find something that uses radiosity and photons too. A lot of his 2004 ones seem to be using some sort of experimental stuff. The thumbnails look a lot worse than the full images. Look like he was experimenting with complex textures and stuff, including some photon effects in one ocean based one, but the 2003 ones are definitely worth a look, as are his earlier works.

Another posted one recently on the forums that the only issue anyone could come up with was that the clouds looked somehow off. It literally looked to me like someone took a picture of clouds, then cut out a photo, only to paste that over top of the cloud picture. Unfortunately the version on his website when I last checked was an earlier work in progress of it.

Point being that trying to use a competition site as an example is rediculous. As is assuming that algorythms designed to mimic real physics must be inferior to ones that use various non-physics based tricks to do the same job.

(You can see the homepage of the same image here if the pov website gets slashdotted)

Of course, no article on POV-Ray is complete without the obligatory link to the site of Monsieur Gilles Tran, surrealist and POV-artist extraordinaire...

Has he entered the competition? Haven't seen his name anywhere so far...

She doesnt have three breasts, but you will get your pizza delivered by an Imperial shuttle.

That said, there are of course also a lot amazing images that are 100% done in Povray, but as said, that is than more done with fractals and stuff, than 'modeled'.

As an example see the Making of 'The wet bird'

One of the hall of fame pictures featured, The Wet Bird was the March-April 2001 IRTC Winner.

This is an amazing piece of artwork. One of the other artists (scroll to bottom) even mentions that "The Wet Bird" was accused of being a photograph when it was submitted.

Unbelievable stuff.

Show me a GPU that turns a 24KB input file into this and I might be inclined to believe you.

I dunno, the rainy street image looks kind of fake and plastic to me...

Hmm, then why do the best povray images look so... fake... and plastic?

Gilles Tran, the artist who made 'The Wet Bird' piece has a wonderful 9-page series of web pages on The Making of the Web Bird He's one of the best 3D artists our there in any media. You can see more of his gallery here

Gilles Tran, the artist who made 'The Wet Bird' piece has a wonderful 9-page series of web pages on The Making of the Web Bird He's one of the best 3D artists our there in any media. You can see more of his gallery here

Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.

POV-Ray's a bit different from usual 3D rendering and modelling software, in that a lot of the effort has gone into making a programming language which can then be used to generate objects. Typical renderers strive to render as many triangles as possible as quickly as possible, while POV-Ray gives you an entire programming environment. For instance, while a typical 3D modeller might laboriously hand-craft a tree out of triangles, shaders and alpha-blended foliage textures, a POV-Ray user would effectively write a program for generating trees.

A different approach giving different sorts of results, and while POV-Ray might not be suitable for, say, modelling, animating and rendering feature films, it can be used to create some quirky, glorious images. Who cares if it's not some carbon-copy of Maya or Renderman - an alternative approach is always appreciated.

People are always complaining about 'programmer art'. With POV-Ray, programming is visual art. :-)

Even has some POVrotica.

I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran, creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...

Highly recommended!

I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran, creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...

Highly recommended!

By the way, an illustration of the different cultures of NASA and the Russian space program is the kinds of laptops they allow their astro- and cosmonauts to carry onto the ISS. The standard laptop is a Pentium-166 IBM Thinkpad, but what if you want more speed for some reason? It would have cost a fortune to put, say, a 1GHz Pentum 4 through NASA's screening process, but the Russians decided not to worry about it. It worked just fine, even when running processor-intensive tasks all the time, and now the Russians know that a more capable laptop version generally doesn't have problems with the space environment. It's a bit "shoddier", but a lot more relaxed.

Mark's Shuttleworth's an interesting guy. He knew one of the developers of the POV-Ray raytracer, and before he went into orbit he comissioned an image to be rendered on his laptop while in orbit. It was done by Gilles Tran and Jaime Piqueres, two well respected POV-Ray artists. Gilles has the story on his website.

One of the questions in the interview is:
Q: (Something about somebody rendering an image in space using Linux on an IBM laptop.)?

I believe this is the image: Reach for the stars

Really?

Looks
pretty good to me.

Sure, it's hard to compare a ray tracer and a scanline renderer, but with enough patience you can do amzingly beautiful things.

That said, Gilles has been putting out some amazing POV-Ray pictures, and to complain that he uses Poser characters is a bit odd. That's the whole point of using Poser.

Well, that and making CGI pr0n afforable to the masses. C'mon people! Isn't this what computer technology is all about?

Did I say pr0n? I meant art! Art!

Couple of 3D renderers made a frontpage recently, buy I think povray outputs still beat them all. Just take a look at this guy works, click on "detail" (like this one and be amazed.

Couple of 3D renderers made a frontpage recently, buy I think povray outputs still beat them all. Just take a look at this guy works, click on "detail" (like this one and be amazed.

Gilles Tran has done incredible stuff with POV-Ray. (plus there's all those funky stories in the book of beginnings)

Yes, and if you look closely you can really see his attention to detail.

Also check out http://www.oyonale.com/

Gilles Tran has done incredible stuff with POV-Ray. (plus there's all those funky stories in the book of beginnings)

For those that want it, there's a popular (shareware? I've never used it) graphical system for Windows called Moray. It apparently allows you to graphically setup your scene, and it generates the POV source for you to tweak as you see fit.

I've started working on entries for the Internet Ray Tracing Competition, it's been a lot of fun. The current topic is "Fantasy and Mystic", and is due August 31st. Some of the work done is simply *incredible* (check out Gilles Tran, freaking awesome). Come on you Fantasy and Sci Fi folks, you'll love it. (And you're not required to use POV-Ray for the IRTC, btw, but it's sponsored by the great folks who bring us POV.) Go browse the IRTC galleries, some of the winners are truly stunning.

And lastly, for those interested, here's my first submission to the IRTC contest (topic: "Insects and Spiders"), it's called Pond Life

Seriously! Everybody go check it out! No, it's not as easy as lots of other packages. But I must say this is the most fulfilling programming I have ever done. (Probably because my robots don't work yet. ;)