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go to POV-Ray's search page type in "SSS", select the "just news.povray.org (our user community discussion site)" radio button and then search.

one of the first results should be this thread which looks quite good.

go to POV-Ray's search page type in "SSS", select the "just news.povray.org (our user community discussion site)" radio button and then search.

one of the first results should be this thread which looks quite good.

It's about time high dynamic-resolution imaging was supported in hardware. It's not only simple to use, but makes many many things easier--no more worrying about hitting the 8-bit limit, picking colors to avoid saturation/overlighting, or struggling with realistic compositing. For compositing alone it's priceless. Debevec even has a light stage for compositing real-life objects into computer-generated scenes (instead of vice versa).

I've been working for a while now on HDRI solutions for things like POV-Ray--even if it is a pseudo-solution. (Or you can get the ml-POV patch for more native HDRI support.)

Aay! I dont know WHAT IS THIS, but you could render this image in a day on a 486 with POV-RAY

I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like he's doing forward ray-tracing on the whole scene. Conventional ray-tracing traces the light rays backwards, i.e from the camera/eye out into the scene and finally back to the light(s). The only problem is that it doesn't really do caustics or diffuse lighting well. POVray faked caustics in version 3 (IIRC), and Radiance has done excellent diffuse lighting using a monte-carlo simulation for about a decade. In recent years photon maps have also developed. These apply forward ray-tracing to selected areas, usually selected refractive and reflective surfaces. The impact points for the photons are recorded and then used in a regular renderer (either scan-line or ray-tracer) as an additional source of light.

Again, it sounds like this guy wants to do this to the whole scene, and to a very high degree of precision. I'm not sure why. Any decent ray-tracer would get a 99% solution in a fraction of the time. Hell, in good hands even scan-line renderers can get a 90% solution even quicker, just look at all the motion-picture visual effects (and whole movies) rendered with Pixar PRman. Most effects don't even need a good ray-tracer to look realistic to most people. Unless he's rendering something more interesting than shiny balls and a mirror, or going to do something interesting with the trillions of photons (near-real-time camera-independent renders?), I really don't see the point. It's still kinda interesting though, if only because of the scale of the work. It might lead somewhere, you just never know.

Especially with photon calculation speedups among other improvements in the beta release of POV-Ray v3.6, it would be interesting to do a comparison between the two photon models...

Less can be more, but more is often so much more. The Chado Hall of Fame image is stunning. I'm still trying to convince myself that it's not a photograph.

Will we now see Photorealistic Renderman come out for OSX and the G5? Hopefully?

Interesting... i thought to myself, what about BMRT as a renderman compliant renderer, if there is a Mac version, for those not wanting to wait for Pixar or Apple. But now www.bmrt.org doesn't seem to be resolving, and any results Google gives back seem to be a bit dated.

Then i read the renderman faq and found this tidbit:

Exluna, Inc.'s "Entropy" renderer was the commercial big brother of
BMRT. But that really doesn't do it justice -- it was very fast and
efficient scanline renderer that also supports ray tracing, global
illumination, area lights, and caustics. More Info from:
http://www.exluna.com. Entropy was used on Star Wars Episode 2,
Stuart Little 2, Reign of Fire, Blizzard, Hero, The Returner, and The
Core. Entropy and BMRT was discontinued after Pixar sued Exluna and
several of Exluna's founders.

That's sort of sad. Well, there's always POV-Ray Though it does aim towards RenderMan compliance.

It's true that the POVRay license is rather unusual, and does prohibit commercial distribution. (According to their legal page, the POVRay community has been apparently trying to move away from this to something more common...I hope the BSD or GPL license...and this will apparently be done with the v4 rewrite).

The thing is, while Fedora can be now, I suppose, considered "commercial", Dag and Freshrpms are decidedly not commercial.

Good thought...I suppose that could be the problem.

Here's one of my forays into architectural design using Moray and POVRay. It took about a half day to do working off of graph paper blueprint sketches. Though it's not interactive, the visual quality (architectural composition aside :P ) is much cleaner than anything currently available in a game. VRML is a lot like the POV format, for the most part, so some tools should be able to convert from one to the other, allowing you to use VRML to make your designs interactive. Search around on Freshmeat and the like for tools that might be able to handle both formats...

Good luck, and have fun!

Telling a musician they should write music in lilypond with a text editor is similar telling a graphic artist not to use that silly Photoshop, or even GIMP -- he should be be writing PostScript code with a text editor.

There currently is no GIMP-level quality free software for music typesetting.

There are some people who don't think this is the case, they think that no software should be propietary. That's what I'm disagreeing with.

For example, take this image. You might think that's a fine raytraced image.

That's about the lousiest raytraced image I've ever seen. Now this is a fine raytraced image!

Out of curiosity, why did your company consider it a bad thing that Blender exported to a 3rd party app for raytracing?
To me, it would seem like this is an advantage, because then you aren't locked in to one raytracer.
Plus, Povray is AWESOME. I was hopelessly addicted to making a recreation of a Dr. Seuss scene. It was my first real project using povray (aka non chrome ball over green and white checkers) and it turned out VERY decently!
povray is VERY professional grade software. check out these for what povray is really capable of.

I will admit that raytracing is slow, but I'd like to know what is "better" than raytracing. The most recent version of POV-Ray not only does raytracing, radiosity, caustics and photon mapping, but comes with a dizzying array of primitives, lighting effects (including area lights for soft shadows), procedural and image-based textures, dozens of primitives, and a surprisingly powerful macro language. The unofficial patch of POV-Ray, MegaPov, adds many other features, such as visible light sources and cloth simulation.

Furthermore, a raytraced image is mathematically accurate, while a rendered image is merely an approximation. In raytracing, a sphere is an absolutely perfect sphere, where every single surface point is the same distance from the center. A rendered sphere is composed of a mesh of triangles, and its accuracy varies with the size of those triangles.

And let's not leave out the best part of raytracing: the input format is simple human-readable (and writable) text files with an easily-grasped scene-description syntax. There is something very satisfying about sitting down to a text editor with nothing but an idea in your head, describing it to the machine, and watching as that idea becomes a photo-realistic image. I've been raytracing for over a decade, and I still find that thrilling.

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.

The standard Linux benchmark is to time how long it takes to compile the kernel. Another benchmark I know of for Linux is the POV-Ray benchmark scene.

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

You might consider using straight OpenGL to do it. Just keep track of your position and angle of sight with variables, and render your scene. I've designed buildings like that before. It is very similar to a 1st person shooter, but without the rocket launchers. (it would be cool to frag your house though).

Another very good option, used by a lot of architects, is ray tracing. You don't get live animations, but the still images are excellent - photo quality if you are good. There is a really good open source ray tracer called Pov-ray. I use it all the time. I've also used it to design a room.

• If you read any of the numerous tutorials on Blender, you can get the hang of the UI in less than a half hour.

That depends on what you mean by "get the hang of the UI". Sure, you can figure out that buttons can be pushed and that everything in Blender looks like a button. At least form could fit the function, y'know?

The main problem is that the UI doesn't give you any clue how to perform tasks. For example, might know, for example, that you need to add bones to your mesh. But how to do that?

I know that it can be done, but looking through the menus and tabs, I can't see hide nor hare of anything like a Add Bones option. Once the bones are added, how are they supposed to be parented to the mesh? Again, the UI doesn't give any clue.

Just because you (or any other number of users) can figure out how to do great things in Blender - and Blender is an amazingly powerful program - doesn't mean that it's got a good UI. I could just as easily point to the Persistance of Vision Raytracer and claim that it's got a great user interface, because lots of people can use it and produce great work with it.

It's great that you can memorize a zillion different keystrokes, but I can't. That means I can't use Blender without an Internet connection, so I can download the outdated manual, or search for an outdated tutorial, or head over to the friendly folk on #blenderchat for some help.

• Most people that complain about Blender and it's interface haven't read any of the documentation on it and spent 30 minutes trying to figure it out.

There are other Free software programs that support animation, such as Art of Illusion and Anim8or. There are up and coming contenders, such as JPatch and Wings3D that don't yet support animation, but promise to in the near future. As powerful as Blender is, I'm hanging my hopes one one of these less powerful, but more user friendly applications.

(In fairness should note that Ton has recently set up a forum for the improvement of Blender, and one of the main focuses on Blender 2.0 will be an improved user interface.)

1) Unreal Tournment 2003, Enemy Territory, Quake3, Neverwinter Nights, etc. And much, much more with Wine such as Soldier of Fortune 2.

2) Grip, VERY good CD Ripping app. Will auto download CDDB, run the encoder of your choice, etc. As for raytracing Povray can do a lot too, but you just need a good modeler, such as Kpovmodeler. As for a one click installer, check out RPMs or RedHat's Package Management System, looks just like Install Shield.

3) KDE,Gnome,etc. You DO know that they can be themed to look just like the crappy Windows GUI too don't you?

POV-Ray is a free raytracer for making computer-generated images. You can build up 3D scenes using the Scene Description Language (SDL), rather than a modeller; and after a little practice, you naturally move toward writing algorithms to generate more complex images, etc. It comes with lots of sample code, a good help file, and could be used as a way to learn programming. The nice thing about it is that the language itself is simple to use, and making pretty pictures is a good incentive to keep practicing and learning more.

You can do pretty nice things with the SDL. The help files explain how to write a raytracer within POV-Ray. You can also read and write text files, etc.

POV-Ray is a free raytracer for making computer-generated images. You can build up 3D scenes using the Scene Description Language (SDL), rather than a modeller; and after a little practice, you naturally move toward writing algorithms to generate more complex images, etc. It comes with lots of sample code, a good help file, and could be used as a way to learn programming. The nice thing about it is that the language itself is simple to use, and making pretty pictures is a good incentive to keep practicing and learning more.

You can do pretty nice things with the SDL. The help files explain how to write a raytracer within POV-Ray. You can also read and write text files, etc.

Most of these formats output 24 bits per pixel with 8 bits for each of red, green and blue data. PNG and PPM allow you to optionally specify the output bit depth from 5 to 16 bits for each of the red, green, and blue colors, giving from 15 to 48 bits of color information per pixel. The default output depth for all formats is 8 bits/color (16 million possible colors), but this may be changed for PNG and PPM format files by setting Bits_Per_Color=n or by specifying +FNn or +FPn, where n is the desired bit depth.

In addition to support for variable bit-depths, alpha channel, and grayscale formats, PNG files also store the Display_Gamma value so the image displays properly on all systems (see section "Display Hardware Settings"). The hf_gray_16 global setting, as described in section "HF_Gray_16" will also affect the type of data written to the output file.

Naw, that's not it.

Firstly, around half the species with interstellar capability have adopted a left hand axial orientation, so for them it is the Y-axis that points to Galactic Center. Visit POV-Ray for more info on this fascinating issue (unofficial motto: "Ray tracing by aliens, for aliens"). It's all in the thumbs. And, err, finger curl.

But mostly everyone orienting with their artificial gravity generators in the same plane is just common courtesy. Even if you are about to loose your entire forward phaser bank on his weapons array, it's considered gauche to be so slovenly in your ship maneuvers that you slosh the coffee out of the other captain's cup. Nobody thinks a lapful of hot coffee is funny.

Well, everything's compiled from source
and personally I've looked through and fixed
All of the USB core in the kernel, the ADSL driver for my modem, povray.
I've partly gone through Arson
and looked at lots of other source (including postgres)

So, I'm sure the ADSL software is spyware free the USB core looks ok too(if a bit badly documented and buggy)
and I've never found anything bad in povray.

sn0w 0wnz j00!

Seriously, this is one of the more intriguing articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. It's made my bookmarks and is certainly inspiration to whip up some stuff in PoV. I'm an old math and geometry buff (and former resident of the Great White North) and appreciate the beauty of snow. Perhaps moreso that I've got all the technology crap to play with it, yet now live in a warm climate.

Yet, there we geeks were, spellbound decades ago by Julias and Mandelbrots, and accumulating libraries of books, like:

The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Benoit B. Mandelbrot

The Science of Fractal Images (Peitgen, Saupe)

The Beauty of Fractals (Peitgen, Richter)

The Algorithmic Beatuy of Plants (Prusinkiewicz, Lindenmayer)

All the while, I could have gone outside and been inspired by a light dusting of tiny snow or those huge flakes which fell infrequently in a dead calm. Sometimes it is good to get outside.

That's why I'm still playing NetHack...well that and because it's still the best game out there.

Seriously though, can these super cards be used for anything other than the generation of display output? As they are doing so much 3D processing so much faster than any CPU can, I'd like to see the ability to use these GPU's as coprocessors for rendering images back to software/files rather than just to display output. Something like using it as a hardware accelerator for POV-Ray or Renderman. Does anybody have any insight into potential non-traditional uses of these super cards?

Ever heard of povray?

As for network - do you need throughput or low latency? Depeding on your problem small changes in algorithm can do wonders. E.g. for film rendering you might choose a few NAS and a hoard of dumb/diskless rendering slaves. If you copy the model libraries (for the included figures, textures, etc.) onto a local disk at the beginning of a scene render run, you will decrease net load a big deal (I've done that with Provray rendering myself).

If you don't have the rerssources to buy e.g. Myrinet, try alternative architectures if they might fit your problem, e.g. hypercubes (see other posts) or models like Flat Neighbourhood.

I would like to add my "me too!" here. POV-Ray is a very good renderer. Not only is it easy to use but it has its own language built in. The language is similar to that used by Pixar's Renderman but un-alike enough to avoid legal disputes. A number of modellers now support POV-Ray and POV-Ray has proved itself by being used in one or two movies as the render engine for the computer graphics. (I forget which ones but I do remember reading blurbs about it being used.)

Some other useful things:

1. AC3D, Moray, Strata 3D, and Hash have all been mentioned. I believe they all now support POV-Ray output.

2. Go to the POV-Ray website. They have a multitude of links to other locations where you can download and try various pieces of software. A lot of them are free.

3. Go to 3D Cafe to get a lot of 3D models which you can use (most for free some for a fee!) in whatever you want so long as you give the authors credit. They are a great starting point for creating your own models. In fact, there are sites around the world which have tons of free models. For military ones go to military sites. Space - NASA, European Space Agency, etc....

I know I'm deviating a bit here but something to think about with POV-Ray: You can now get IBM PCs dirt cheap on the net. Maya costs $1,500.00 or more. Lightwave is about $3,000.00. You can get six or seven dirt cheap, 800mhz systems for around $200.00 each with 128mb of memory, install Linux on all of them, hook them up via ethernet, and go to town rendering at six times the speed that one copy of Maya or Lightwave will give you. Who cares if it takes six minutes per line? At 1280x1024 it would normally take you 6144 minutes(a little more than four days) but with six systems that is reduced to about 17 hours. In our experience, even dealing with a fully stocked space station, the space shuttle, and all of the items in the space shuttle's cargo bay (with reflects, transparencies, et al) it only normally takes about three to six minutes to render a single frame. (Everything takes up about 500MB to 1GB for all of the models.) In fact - it generally takes POV-Ray longer to read in all of the modelling information than it does to do the actual render. So I'd really think about it. POV-Ray is really very powerful.

...know that the renderer does not a quality scene make. It doesn't matter whether you use a best of breed render or a cheasy, not-so-great render. If you're a good artist who knows how to make good use of lighting, color, layout, textures, and so forth, you will produce photorealistic work. If you're a sucky artist (as most 3D artists are) and you have this misconception that a great rendering and tool kit is going to save you... well, your work will blow.

The shittiest 3D art I've ever seen (stepping away from the whole "it's art!" idealogy) was done with Lightwave3D. Some of the best I've seen was done with Blender and Caligari trueSpace (an off the shelf package for $100 in some places).

It all comes back to the artists. The software is just a tool. If you don't know how to hammer a nail in straight, a $15,000 hammer won't help.

If you're interested in good looking stills, broke, and understand very high level scripting languages, you might want to look at POV-Ray. Additionally, if you're working on a Windows platform, an outstanding modeller called Moray that works with POV-Ray. The author is very responsive and makes one of the finer modellers I've worked with. POV-Ray has a deathly slow renderer though.

Go with the POV-Ray raytracer and do what I do -- TYPE your graphics. I swear, you young punks today don't know what 3D graphics are... mutter, grumble...

Besides, it's free.

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.

Blender supports Python scripts, and there are scripts to export Blender files from Blender to a number of other formats, like Renderman and POV-Ray.

Umm... Linux has had a viable open-source 3D rendering program for a *long* time: POV-Ray

And POV is better than most commercial packages out there. (Doesn't mean I'm good with it, but there are some real Artists in the POV community!)

There are several Python scripts floating around on the web that will export a blender scene to several formats for other renderers, like Renderman (tested with BMRT), POV-Ray, and others. Hopefully now that the source is opened, people will start making the interface smoother, like a menu where you can choose the renderer. It shoudn't be too hard. And the interface is nice.

Someone look at this and tell me how you can tell it's not a picture...

So what is new in Povray 3.5?

• Noise Changes
• Photons, Dispersion and Improved Radiosity
• New Light Source Types and Light Groups
• Isosurface and Parametric Objects
• Sphere Sweep Object
• New More Compact Mesh Object & Solid Mesh
• UV Mapping
• Improved Textures
• Improved and Faster Media
• New Patterns
• New Functions
• Additional New Features
  • Reading of JPEG and TIFF image formats
  • Projected through
  • More realistic attenuation
  • New clock keywords
  • New image size keywords
  • Inverse transform
  • Spherical camera
  • New float function: inside
  • Splines
  • Metallic reflection
  • Mapping using warps
  • Double illuminate flag
  • No image and no reflection flags
  • Basic Unicode Support
  • Declare a float constant from an INI file
• Bug Fixes and Enhancements
  • Light source enhancements
  • Fixed normal average, reflection and other related problems
  • Fixed cylinder camera problems
  • Fixed the use of multiple closed bezier-splines in prism
  • Fixed infinite cone bug
  • Fixed the use of two subsequent colors, not separated by a comma in checker, hexagon and bricks.
  • Fixed gamma correct bugs
  • Numerous other bug fixes and optimizations

Agent_Eight writes: As far as scene files and generated images ... hey your free to do whatever you want with the images.

This is incorrect: read the license again. You are not permitted to make any derivative works using the files in the SCENES directory, except for those in its INCDEMO subdirectory, or distribute such works, unless the file itself explicitly grants this permission, and most do not. Copying any text out of one of the supplied scenes files for use in a description of your own image would be to make a derivative work.

If enforced strictly, it would be dangerous to even read the scenes files if you later on plan to use povray to make similar images, though in practice this is unlikely to be enforced.

PovRay is not open source, but rather has a very complicated licensing scheme. Not only that, care must be taken to be sure even that an image you produce with PovRay is legal to distribute, since there are rather severe licensing restrictions on many of the object description files provided with PovRay you must read these carefully to be sure that what you are doing is legal.

A pair of red lego blocks on a sadisticly-tinted red/blue checkerboard plane. I'd post the image, but anywhere I COULD post it would die a horrible death. Render it yourself.

Just clarifying the reference.

Pov-Ray is free, but have you ever tried animating with POV-Ray? Going above simple movement operations, the math becomes incredibly difficult that you start considering selling your car to buy a copy of Maya :) A|W isn't selling to the mass consumer since the mass consumer would never buy Maya. Microsoft is selling to the mass consumer and cares a little more if your version of Windows is licensed. Microsoft is potentialy losing sales, while A|W is gaining sales from companies hiring people who have used Maya

If you've got a Mac...

• Strata 3dBase is what I use.
• POVRAY runs on a lot of platforms besides the Mac too.
• RenderBoy is also out there.

The Strata product is free. It has some disabled functions (for example: it only does single light sources), but it renders very nicely. POVRAY has a more difficult UI. RenderBoy is $25 shareware.

povray.org
Excellent for programmers.

POV-Ray is a great freeware raytracing engine for Win, Mac, and Unix. It makes use of an easy to learn text-format scene description language. There was a set of include files available for POV-Ray that you could use in your scene description to describe the "camera" lenses and thus yield up many teriffic lens flares. I forgot the name of the package, but I think you can still find it in the contrib section. Very impressive!

http://www.povray.org/

Gimp and POV-Ray.

But wait for the new themes.org - it's going to rule.

You can do anything with command line that you can do with GUI. BUT, with CLI or line by line programming you can't design other GUIs as nicely. You can still do it, piece of cake... but to make a really good GUI with standard programming, takes a LOT of time and a LOT of effort.

Well, since you use "You", I can answer directly that you are incorrect. I personally can whip out Java GUI apps much more quickly and with much better functionality than with using a GUI tool to do so. For many other people it's the same. Especially with Java and it's layout managers, your GUI is much more that "stick a button this big over here". It's quite easy to program a UI that will scale up to the needed component sizes, even if you change the language on the fly (or just on startup). On the other hand, internationalization is a pain in VB and such.

With a tool like Visual Basic(ugh! VB sucks!) your GUIs and forms are easy to design and manipulate. You can make the same forms and GUIs with C++ or Java but it will take you longer, it's much harder to do complex things and lots of times your design will LOOK awkward.

Again, for me I personally can make professionall looking UI's quite quickly in Java with pure code. Plus my code is smaller, faster, and has fewer bugs. And as far as complex, when was the last time you had a UI change from English to French or Japanese with no problems at all?

You wouldn't make a complex 3d model of anything programming polygons... you could.

Actually.... I could. Depending on the subject matter, for many 3D models I can get something nicer done more quickly by 'coding' it directly in POV-Ray script. This of course depends on the subject matter, but just because one person finds one way faster doesn't mean that another person won't be faster a different way. Just sometimes I'd go with 3DS or Strata, other's I'd just code by hand. And sometimes I'd write a custom C program to make the model. It just all depends.

And just in case it's a factor, I've programmed multimedia products before for many platforms, and have done 3D artist work for Interplay.

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. ;)