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What are you looking for in 3D - is pov ray good enough for you?

• View it in Netscape
• View it in Lynx
• Derive some data and stuff it in a database (what search engines do)
• Run it through a filter that removes words I find offensive
• Have it read to me by a text-to-speech program
• Hyperlink the name Bill Gates like this.

Yes, the average game cost millions to produce. Think of this, though: The average MOVIE costs $50M to produce, yet Robert Rodreguez produced "El Marachi" for $7000 and made millions off of it.


And do I even need to mention "The Blair Witch Project"? Movie production: $4000. Advertising through sneaky web-hoaxes: $0. Making millions upon millions of dollars with your micro-budget indie flick: priceless.


Spare time programming is difficult and slow, but it's free. Artists WILL donate graphics and sound for your project, if it's cool enough (and especially if they're still in college).


When I found out it was now possible to program your own games on a Dreamcast, I bought two. This, combined with free 3D raytracers like blender and povray save approx. $45000 off the cost of a traditional development system.


The video game industry is bloated. Billions of dollars are wasted on copycat titles. We are long overdue for some guys in a garage to blow the big boys away with a game that embodies what the industry SHOULD be all about... creativity.

Pixar has a patent on the stochastic dither multi-sample antialias. They've enforced it before.

Uh-oh. POV-Ray uses it. Shh, don't tell Pixar. Wait, you used to work for Pixar... But, that was a zillion years ago. How long 'till the patent expires?

Why do I see no mention of POV-Ray?

It's not GPL, but they're thinking about adopting that licence.

Bah! Any true artist knows that the one true way to do POV-Ray is with Emacs and pov-mode. ;-)

povray has a linux version that allows multi-machine rendering...

Don't forget the POVLAB development effort, which is beginning to pick up the pace. POVLAB has been around for years as a modeller for POV-Ray, and is just now being rewritten in C++ and made cross-platform with wxWindows.

See the POVLAB development site for details and to find out if you would like to help.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile high building to be built in Chicago in the 50's, and they didn't build it for this exact reason.

PovRay rendering of mile high building

More images

Was the mile high building in Star Wars Episode 1?

Speaking for my company (a games company) if we released a game which was only "fairly fast" we wouldn't last long ;)

When a game of Tetanus (a popular Tetris clone) first starts, it is quite literally running at two frames per second. Two! The graphics are simplistic but easy to parse. But once Alice makes lines, it starts speeding up until her brain explodes.

Some of us still want gameplay, not graphics. If we wanted graphics, we'd be playing GIMP or POV-Ray.

mcmonkey wrote:
Where are they going to get a base tower 50 Km tall? The tallest buildings are the Petronas Towers, both under .5 Km, so they're talking about something 100 times taller. In the 60-odd years between the Empire State Building (1931) and the Petronas(1996), the height of the tallest building increased less than 20%. So...last 70 years, 20% growth, next 50 years, 10000% growth.

The reason we haven't built bigger buildings has a lot more to do with economics and logistics than with technology. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high tower called The Illinois that was never built ... not because we couldn't (we probably could), but because nobody wanted to pay for it; one building that size would double the commercial real estate in downtown Chicago all by itself; the higher the building, the greater a percentage is devoted to dead space in elevator tubes that serve higher floors; and just logistically getting everyone who worked there to their desks in the morning would take all the transportation capacity of a modern major city, all pointing at maybe four square blocks, and taking six hours to fill and then empty the building.

And what happens when something flies into this thing? Heck, birds have trouble avoiding wind mills, so I expect this will generate a fair amount of road kill. I certainly wouldn't want to be on my way up when an airplane hits.

Well, one would hope that would never happen. But I'd rather ride on an elevator than a bomb made of rocket fuel. (R.I.P. 51-L)

FYI, Canadians: the committee on tall buildings ruled that Petronas is the tallest building, while CN Tower is the tallest freestanding structure. They're really not comparable.
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Good point. Personally, I've been thinking of using some free tools (POVray and the mpeg_movie suite) to try and create a short (<2 min) video clip that shows Linux and open-source software in a positive light. This clip could be broadcast on Public Access TV, various websites, and possibly major networks if someone fronts the cash. (*cough* RedHat, SuSE) Is anyone working on a project like this, and could they use some help? I'm willing to contribute.

This is probably necessary, because people in general pay more attention to pretty pictures than to well-thought-out arguments. Sad but true; propaganda for the masses is one of the areas where Linux/BSD/Plan 9 have not concentrated their efforts, and it's showing. Let's see if we can change that.

Disclaimer: I'm slightly drunk, but I'll stand by this post, as it's an important issue and one that needs to be addressed.

http://www.povray.org

POVRAY is a free, open source (not GPL but something similiar) ray tracing engine which has a fairly simple language for defining scenes.

It works with nearly every OS. However it is quite a bit different from OpenGL. POVRAY is a program for creating scenes and movies while OpenGL can be used for more interactive types of programs.

The source distribution of POVRAY has a file called povuser.txt which will walk you through a tutorial of its general features and capabilities.

It depends. If you want to program still and animated 3D graphics, then you have quite a few choices. Here are a (tiny) subset of the ones I know:

• Here is a series of accessible tutorials on the mathematics and implementation of 3d graphics
• OpenGL is the API of choice for most platforms. Simple, clear and easy to understand. It does assume that you know what the basics are though.
• Mesa is a free workalike implementation of OpenGL for most platforms. Reading the source to the included demos is a good way to start learning.
• Python is a very good language with OpenGL bindings with which to start messing around. If C and C++ seem too tedious just for experimenting then try PyOpenGL. Python itself can be learned in a weekend after which the GL module is there to play around with.

If you're not interested in programming - just modelling and creating then check out:

• Povray - a flexible raytracer
• Blender - a modelling, animation and sequence editing suite
• Some examples of what is possible

All of these tools and references are free and work on Windows and Linux alike.

Also, how prohibitive is the hardware for this kind of thing?

All you need is a resonable midrange PC and a decent accelerator. A hardware-accelerated graphics card on your platform is a must to view complex 3D graphics at any kind of framerate. Vendors with good Linux support include include Ati, nVidia, Matrox and 3Dfx.

POV-Ray is a freeware opensource ray tracer. It is very well supported in the community as there are many different patches that inhance POV-Ray in itself. Not only is this program open source and freeware, it's on every damn operating system I can think of (Very short list hehe) But you'll find it for Windows, Linux, Macs, Amiga, DOS, etc.

There are several others such as, sPatch (kind if dead, but if you can find it you'll love it. It's a modeller that lets you export to POV-Ray or export DXF files.)

Another fun little program which I haven't had the time to play with is Blue Moon Rendering Tools. Read this for more info on BMRT.

Finally there is Radiance. I haven't had time to mess with this program, but it can make stunningly realistic images through the programs usage of realistic lighting. This is only for UNIX users at the moment. There is no known port (that I know about) that is in the works.

Well that's just a list of some 3d goodies. I've wanted to toy around with 3ds Max for a while. Sure I could have warezed it off, but I've given up on that. Now I can play around with a free stripped down version of 3dsmax. Yippie skippy or something.

-PovRayMan

I use it myself, and it is very nice. It doesn't use hardware acceleration, which would be nice, but it renders beautifully. If you're into 3d and don't know about it, check it out immediately.

Okay.. this sucks. I've been repeatedly trying to post this as me (i am drrobin_) but I am getting "Unknown Error While Posting". So I'm gonna try doing it as AC.

I haven't read all of the posts on here (because I'm a lazy ninja), but I feel compelled to stuff my opinion down everyone's throats.

I have always been of the opinion that programming is the newest form of sorcery around. With a computer, you can emulate states of mind, create personages and automatons, and change the very nature of reality. There is nothing quite as magical as a piece of code written by a caring and careful programmer.

Right now, I'm barely an apprentice. Hell, my web site is but a skeleton of what it could (at some point) be. I'm trying to learn Perl so that I can create things of value, maybe learn PHP and a half-a-dozen other things, but my main goal is to be able to make my visions come to life.

Any programming language, be it POV-Ray's scripting "language" to the highest orders of C++, can be a way to make magic happen. It's just a matter of knowing the proper chants and incantations to get there.

I just want to be a magician of the first order. I want to have a vision and be able to bring it to a loving existance with a minimum of headaches. There's where the magic lies.
AfroNinja

This looks really neat, to say the least. They don't mention a price, though. It's probably well above $1000, seeing as it's basically a flat-panel display with calibrated backlighting and fancy circuitry.

Soo many applications... I could probably rig POV-ray to do spiffy 3d with it, it would rock for 3d games (well, maybe not.. it seems like you have to keep your head straight, not something that happens often when gaming), it might also be good for VRML... Ooh the possibilities...

Well this is a great step in the right direction, but what I would realy like to see is some of those powerful 3D tools ported to linux. Currently we have POVRAY, and Blender 3D as free, or virtualy free full fledged packages. There are some comercial packages that most of us can not afford like Houdini (sorry I dont know the url, I cant afford it so I dont keep it handy), but a good package in the smae price range is an absolute necesity. Blender 3D is nice, but it's modeler is not as easy to use as such *indo*s packages as Lightwave and 3D Studio Max. We have GIMP, now we need LinuxWave or 3D Studio Linux, and maybe this is a step in the right direction. Unfortunatly I doubt Maya will be affordable either and it's unfortunate, as it is an awsome program. If anyone with any pull is reading this or if someone wants to send me some other options I would be most happy to finaly dismiss windows as only needed to play Asheron's Call. What a wonderful day that will be and the masses shall rejoice and the evil giant will feel yet another foot being slamed into a most uncomfortable place!

I'm still waiting for real-time ray-tracing. Once you look at a ray-traced image, every time you look at polygons you'll say "Yuck, what's that?" I have to say, though, that those textures and bump maps almost make up for it. Go get POV-Ray and see what I mean.

Well said! Does anyone remember when the Linux System Administrator's Guide (or was it the NAG) explicitly stated that upgrading often was a bad idea? That it is only a good idea to upgrade if you need some feature or bugfix? That was back in the day when people actually used their source and hacked around on Linux like the wonderful tool it is, instead of merely screaming at unpaid developers to release code more quickly. If you needed a security hole patched or a new device supported, you wrote the driver (Okay I'll admit that it was a lot easier to get device specs back then) instead of harrassing an underpaid and overworked developer who released software publically in his/her spare time. If you didn't like the way your window-manager looked or worked, you edited the code.

When did the mentality change? I came to Linux from a Windows world, and I came to Windows from a Macintosh world. I think you're right that Windows has ruined a lot of people... not just Windows generally, but definitely Windows 95 and Windows NT.

Some of you must've used Windows 3.1 before. Granted that it's really of limited utility when put on the same table as Linux/Unix... but, did you ever feel the need to upgrade drivers every two weeks? Or call Microsoft (before the widespread explosiong of the 'Net) to ask if there was a new patch to KRNL386.EXE? If you're like me, no. It worked, it wasn't going to run any better, and it didn't crash too often, so you left it alone and read PC/Computing or PC Magazine for nifty tips to work around the rough edges.

It seems like that with the dawn of Win95, Microsoft just releases code whenever the upper-management say so, not when it's ready. Look at NT 4.0 (and NT 3.51). It took three service pack releases to make it stable... even by Microsoft's standards.

Maybe if people would remember the days when software was released when it was ready, we wouldn't have these days... the whole Windows 95 mentality seems to be infecting Windows->Linux immigrants. How often do you hear an ex-Mac user say "Three more months until Fooware 1.0???? Heh... MacOS has service releases every x months!"?

Linux is losing speed, mainly due to developer burn-out (Linus, anyone?). Look at all the negative media coverage of the 2.1->2.2 kernel development cycle, the number of people that demand new features in Enlightenment, and all the FUD that gets spread around, and you can see why. Anyone remember when Persistence of Vision had free technical support? The POV team quit the support stuff when people started demanding support and bugfixes and even ports. Expect to see open-source developers dropping projects because of impatient people like this. Personal projects that help a lot of people simply cease to be worth the effort when the vast majority of people bitch and moan instead of present ideas and constructive (and patient) criticism.

With all the people screaming for updates, more recent CVS snapshots, and more features, you begin to wonder if only the people who snicker "What would I want with source code?" are the ones who just don't get the idea of open source. Whether we have some philosophy behind us or not, we still don't get paid... the only benefits we receive are the gratification of a job well done, and, occasionally, a loyal and appreciative following of users.

I think you're right, those of us who actually write Open SourceTM software are seen as nerds.... nerds doing the electronic homework for the business elite. This has to be the greatest weakness of the Open Source model--the ease with which people can abuse it. Our users can gripe all they want, and we can't write them out of the license. They may use all the free software they want without contributing a thing, and perhaps while injuring the Open Source image with their demands and complaints. We mean nothing to the majority of people who use OSS "because it's free" and because they want to be an 3L33T Unix "hacker". We're simply a means to an end.... a convenience.

To put it anonther way... if Open Source disappeared tomorrow... if all the developers finally had enough and ceased development and destroyed all copies of their work.... who other than us developers our loyal users would really care? They simply don't get it. OSS is not about software. It's about people sharing solutions and methods, instead of hording them for personal gain. It's as applicable to a word processor as it is to the cure for cancer. It runs completely counter to the over-commercialized, guerilla-capitalist marketing that is so common here in the US and that Microsft epitomizes.

I mean, come on. How can you honstly expect most PHBs, who have spent their entire lives screwing the little guy over to make a buck, to understand, at the most fundamental level, the idea of giving solutions away for free, with the freedom to improve it? Sure, they understand getting things for free, but sharing things with a larger community? Don't count on it.

Yeah, I agree with you. And to all of you users who give nothing back to the OSS community (not even positive word-of-mouth), go back to Windows and bitch at Bill Gates. I'm sure he'll be willing to listen as well as we are... at $1.45 a minute or $90 an incident.

POVBENCH measures how long it takes to parse and render a specific POV-Ray scene (skyvase.pov) with specific settings and write the resulting image to the disk in chunks of 1000KB. The method in use is ray tracing using floating point math. This method is not the same medhod used to render Toy Story. The resulting image contains 640 * 480 pixels. For each pixel 1 to 9 rays are traced. In addition to those reflected rays are traced, too. 3 seconds is awesome. You can download POV and try for yourself.

This is one of those multi-thousand dollar modelling packages, isn't it?

Personally, I think the open source modellers are getting to the point where they are adequate (if not ideal) for most modelling purposes.

The not open source but free modeller, Blender, from Not a Number is quite powerful, as well (though it's UI is the worst of any program I've ever used. A good example of how a UI can look good but be absolutely impossible to use). Moonlight Creator is open source, and was getting quite good; unfortunately, there's not been a release or any update by the author since June of last year.

For rendering, the open source renderers can for the most part compete with commercial packages in technical features, though do lack a bit of the UI polish.

With all that said, having a high quality, polished commercial package available would be nice!