Slashdot Mirror
POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
Marty writes "The very long awaited version 3.5 of POV-Ray is available. POV is the pre-eminent open source ray tracer. The new version has many wonderful improvements and is able to allow amateurs and pros alike to generate CG images to drool over." I spent many hours mucking about
with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so my guess
is those render times don't suck as bad.
the lack of artistic vision in our mind.
I remember having great fun with POV years ago... It was also very good to poke around at to learn how a ray-tracer works. I'd also recommend the book "Tricks of the Graphics Gurus" for those who don't have it.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
...rendering a glass sphere over a chequered floor has NEVER been done before. Try it!
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
For all you newcomers, POV stands for Persistence-Of-Vision.
POV Ray is great. I had a quick course in POV-Ray when I was a freshman in high school, and it introduced me to C-like programming, and gavee me a solid understanding of how 3D rendering works. Both have served me well in the years since.
:)
Plus I made cool art
POV Ray should be taught to all kids to give an understanding of both how computer programming works, and to dispel the notion that everything computers do (and CG in general) is just 'magic.'
I'd comment on new features, etc etc, except that their website appears to be slashdotted. Maybe in a bit.
Is there, anywhere, an open-source modeler that is as easy to use as Lightwave?
Don't say "Blender" - that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.
*sigh* I miss LW.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Four or five years ago, I did some ray tracing based on a LEGO castle I had built. I used Netshade (a version of Rayshade) with a library for the bricks that someone had created.
Doing a quick Google search, I see that there are now libraries for Povray, as well, now.
Does anyone have experience with doing this? I'm thinking it would be cool to make a movie of some knights marching through my castle, or a train running around.
When I clicked on the pov-ray link there was only one comment and it was already slashdotted... sheesh! Don't you people ever post before you visit links? :)
...check out the Internet Ray-Tracing Competition at http://www.irtc.org to see what povray is capable of. Besides being a great collection of impressive pictures, it is an invaluable source of objects, textures and techniques for povray beginners and masters alike.
While I'm happy to see OS X directly from povray.org instead of some port. I didn't think OS X 10.2 would be available until Auguest 5th.
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
When is the sequel?
POV-Ray v3.5 is Now Available
It is with pleasure that the POV-Team announces that POV-Ray version 3.5 is now officially available for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.
In development for well over two years, v3.5 is a major improvement over all previous versions, not only in features, but in stability and the quality of the documentation and included example files. Of course, we don't claim it to be bug free (in fact, here's our known bugs list), but given our extensive alpha, pre-beta and beta program we feel that what we are releasing today is a stable, well-tested piece of software that can be used with confidence.
Since our first internal alpha version (early 2001), we have built 6 alphas, 14 private pre-betas, 16 public betas, and 6 release candidates to get us to today's final 3.5 release. During this time we read, reviewed, and in many cases answered over 12,000 newsgroup postings in our private and public beta test forums, resulting in many hundreds of bug fixes and improvements.
The POV-Team would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to all those who helped to make this possible, and particularly to our dedicated group of pre-beta testers, who not only performed testing functions but also made major contributions to the scene and documentation files, not only during the pre-beta stage but right up to the days before the final release.
The POV-Team co-ordinator, Chris Cason, would also like to extend his personal thanks to the POV-Team members who worked long and hard on this since we started on it all those years ago. Your dedication is truly appreciated.
[July 09, 2002]
Post your rays. I haven't seen the great art work of the ray tracer since back in university. Only the nerd of nerds had their own home brewed ray traces. Post it up...
I remember rendering the included Chess scene on a 386DX33 and it took almot 72 hours at the resolution and quality that we selected. Later, when my parents bought a spiffy brand-new Pentium 100 it took 15 minutes!
Does anyone else remember POV smacking them in the head with Moore's Law?
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
POV has got to be the most interesting free software ever put out. If you havn't heard of POV before or just didn't bother to check it out, I'd recommend it. While it easy enough for just about anyone to learn, It's script based nature makes it an ideal artistic outlet for programmers.
/. community decides to check it out. The site was slow enough with all those who had been playing around with the beta's .... I did find it amusing that I was downloading the 3.5 package at 3.5kbps.
My hat's off to the POVDEV team, it was worth the wait!
I just hope it manages to get mirrored before the rest of the
In the mean time http://povray.co.uk is still up and will quench your appetite for 3.5 news.
Many years ago I put a few enhancments into my onw build of POV
write out a z buffer with the image using -z at the command line.
and some changes that allow colour gradients to be used for normal gradients.
They still don't seem to have that stuff in pov 3.5
I've also got a reasonable (but 4 years old!) fractal landscape generator I wrote for POV,
oh and when compiled with djgpp I got a 5% performance boost over the stock dos build.
those were the days.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Actually, when I saw "POV" the first thing that came to mind was "point of view".. I also thought "field of vision", as it is only one character off.
He isn't karma whoring. He's being informative. Which is why his post is moderated as such.
We need a mirror!
I get the distinct impression the slashdot editors are playing advanced "Whack-A-Server" lately.
-Adam
I first found out about POV about 2 years ago. I thought (and still think) that it was a great tool. I haven't messed around with it much, but I am going to have to download this newest version and try it out.
...interesting if true.
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.
Fractint and POV-Ray were the first real popular open source graphics tools out there.Fractint brought the Mandelbrot set rendering time from a half hour or so to under a couple of minutes on a 386 system. It is great for providing textures to be mapped on to objects in POV-Ray. You can get it at www.fractint.org...and follow the links to which version you want for what platform.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
a while back.
Does anyone have the link?
In relative terms, povray render times still suck. Since CPUs have gotten so much faster in the last 5+ years, my definition of "slow" has changed quite a bit.
It's really difficult to think of another freeware program that has the longevity and success of POV-Ray.
There are some really powerful tools in this new version. I still find it hard to believe the results possible with POV-Ray...with this and GIMP, you can make great graphics for web pages or excellent digital art. All without spending thousands of dollars on expensive software.
It's also a great tool for teaching kids programming concepts. While you're not creating a program, the syntax is very C-like. You can create macros, apply properties to objects...a few years back I introduced POV-Ray to one of my younger sisters. With absolutely no previous experience in programming, she was creating very interesting scenes in a few hours. It's easy to get kids involved when there are such immediate, and often beautiful, results. You can't get them excited about writing a "Hello, World" dialog box function.
Get out there and start rendering!
...
... /. rendered the site unreachable ;)
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Maybe we could model up some real hair for William Shatner and Sam Donaldson.
C'mon...it's been in the 3.x release series for as long as I can remember. LW is at 7 now and even Maya is at 4.
;)
How can this be any good. Perhaps they should release POVRay2002 instead.
Wow! I remember using MORAY (a modeller) and POV on my 386, probably about 10 years ago. That was some pretty cool stuff, but I can remember rendering times > 10 hours. Oh, how times have changed.
From a quick search on the internet, it appears that MORAY still exists, but the link I found to their homepage was down. Does anyone around here use MORAY as their modeller?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Not only is it fast and featured, but it runs on clusters, using mpi-povray. This site has info on doing it with 3.1, does anyone know if 3.5 works w/clusters??
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Check out LDraw. It lets you virtually put together a Lego model with unlimited pieces. The web site has links to tools that allow you to render your models in POV-RAY.
Submit your code, damnit! The community can use more good coders!
w00t!
Now I don't have to download a new 8 meg file every month.
I'm still deciding whether to use pov 3.5 or megapov 0.7...
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Back in high school, I designed and rendered full-color 3-D covers for our senior yearbook -- front and back rendered at 8.5"x11" at (if I recall correctly) 75dpi. The yearbook committee payed a lot of money to get color laser prints of the front and back covers which were then sent to the publisher. The results were great (award-winning, actually), but I remember each of them took almost two weeks to render on a 486/50DX (not DX2).
I'm sure it would be mere minutes on this 2.52ghz screamer I have here at work, now. Those were the days though -- models built using a ripped-off copy of 3-D Studio, exported as CSV files (if I recall correctly), manipulated using a bunch of Modula-2 utilities I wrote and rendered using surface textures that had to be created via trial and error.
The world's changed a lot since then. I'm glad to see POVRay is still around!
I spent many hours mucking about with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so my guess is those render times don't suck as bad.
Another asinine comment from an Editer [sic] that does nothing to add to the article.
The only reason you commented, Taco, was to bring attention to yourself. Your hubris and ego are incredible.
Update: LNUX at $0.84. shouldn't it be delisted?
Go to www.irtc.org, where they have an ongoing raytracing competition. Not all of it is Povray, but alot of it is.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
*sniff sniff*
:'-)
This brings a tear to my eye
POV-Ray is still here and the commumity is still wonderful!
I've been using POV-Ray since 1997, and by no means am I an expert at coding a complex scene. I just LOVE the program since it was my first taste at 3d graphics. Over the years I've seen people make patches and stuff, then those were combined to make MegaPov. I remember it being July 4th or so in 98 or 99 when POV 3.1 came out. Everyone was going crazy about being so excited since it was going from 3.02 -> 3.1 (IIRC, this was a while ago).
Props to everyone who made 3.5 possible, it's a long awaited update, and very well appreciated.
By the way, if you haven't noticed my name yet...
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
chekc out http://www.povray.co.uk
They have info and reviews of 3.5
mod me up
the more open-source-y a program is, the more slowly the versions increase... except linux... on second thought, never mind... and besides, look at all the skipped major versions (netscape 5, slackware 5,6)
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Wings3d is very easy to use, and FS.
POV-RAY has an obnoxious licensing scheme that's in many ways worse than anything to come out of Microsoft. Not only is the program itself proprietary, but it even goes so far as to stipulate what you can and can't subsequently do with your own artwork. I'm surprised anyone in the geek community, open source enthusiast or otherwise, would want to be associated with POV-RAY. This is the software that gives 'freeware' a bad name.
- PVMPOV
- PvMegaPov
- MPIPOV
- MPI-Povray
I hope that there will be something like this for version 3.5 soon.Don't drink and su! antidisestablishmentariazationally
WARING: this is junk!
Actually, the program I used might not have been POV, but there was some rendering program I used and wow!!! what a difference a math-coprocessor could make! If you want slow. Try a 386 or 486 SX. hahaha.
Again, it has already been pointed out that the restriction on generated artwork is just if you use some of the demo scenes.
These days there are a lot of tools available to help you model complex objects/scenes and realistic landscape with povray, but I have always been amazed by the stuff rendered by early pov artists like Dan Farmer, Truman Brown and most notably, Mike Miller. Those guys put out amazing stuff when there were no modellers targeting pov available. Search the web for their work; unfortunately, most of these gems were written for pov 1.x/2.x and I don't know how easy it is to make them compile with the latest version.
And if so, how do you use it with POVRAY?
What about multiple processors? I haven't been able to hook up with www.povray.org yet (./ effect) so no flames about not reading the change log.
:)
But it always bugged me that POVRAY didn't have better support for multiprocessor systems. Oh sure, you could run two instances of Povray for the top and bottom halves of your image, then splice them together; but why dump that on the end user? Wouldn't it be trivial for the developers to assign each successive pixel to a new process?
I hope 3.5 will automagically detect and use multiple processors. Then I'll worry about getting multiple machines hooked up.
Not only that, but the developers plan on doing a rewrite for version 4, that will allow them to release it under a more permissive license (remember, lots of people contributed to the project under the current license, so chaning it is hard).
The most restrictive part of the license has to do with using other artists' images, which really isn't too terribly different from any other modellers or renderers out there. While I support and advocate Free Media and a public commons of art for all of us to draw upon in our creativity, this restriction is on the art, not the use of the software.
From the horses mouth: [Reference]
It seems relatively clear to me that they would like to release the next version, once it has been rewritten, under a GPL-type license (probably not a *BSD style license based on their historical experiences with people remarketing their work, which led to this somewhat restrictive license in the first place). Their license predates the GPL, and they seem to imply at several points that the GPL, or a license like it, would be sufficient to protect their concerns and guarantee the freedom of their project, which if you read the history section of the aforequoted document, is their main concern.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I nearly scrotched my PhD thesis letting a 486 render 1024x768 scenes for weeks... My supervisor wondered what I would do with the pictures since he didn't believe any journal cared to print them... sigh... 14 hours renderings ought to be published.
I think I'd rather not remember the "goold" old days.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I used to have lots of fun with the DOS versions of POV-Ray.
The graphics of today's games like Unreal Tournament & Quake3 remind me of scenes from the old DOS POV. I'm all into frames per second now, not seconds per frame!
I'd still like to see what a modern raytracer can do though.
I can't remenber exactly, It was years ago, but it rent somthing like this.
a colour map gradient would be say
[0:red,0.1:pink,0.5:green , 1:another colour]
normal gradients used
[0:0.5,0.1:7,0.5:12, 1:another normal value]
This was a pain if you wanted to normals to match you pigment/texture because you had to work them out, and you needed a pigment and normal version of the texture.
The fix was to calculate the normal values of the colour graident and use that for that.
...and took ages to load but I clicked the Windows version download link and it responded instantly and started downloading at 72K/second. I bet the link for the Linux version isn't handling the strain so well.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
I copied the screen shots:
c xvhjlkafhdscnxz.mcn,mvxhfsjalkfhkvanc,.zns afdsfdsafjdsa;lfkdsafkd;lkdsajl fjds;lfsa;lksajfk4eu8cxvzjk
1st Screenshot:
Blue Sky
Reflective-Ball
Ground Made of Grid Lines
2nd Screenshot:
Star Feild
Ball
Ball
Reflective-Ball
Ball
Ground made of Grid-Lines
3rd Screenshot:
Fog
Top side of Cube
Fog
Left Side of Cube
Right Side of Cube
Fog
Water with waves in it
LamnessFilter: fka;jdk;dskdsjnxz.,nweqhkljasdnm,Z.fdhjfahvcmv,zn
dfsafd
fsdak;jdsfkljdsa;
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
by the way.... does anyone mirror the povray www site?
wait--i just got into povray.org. first reaction: AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!! why does everyone hate/stop using frames now? OH NOESS!
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Sure, but what indeed a spectacular piece of junk!!!
Here's a starter for 10
I can only do so many things at once and manage to eat.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I did my first rendering on a 80286 at 10Mhz. Of course it was all simple scenes (which I found damn impressing on my 320x200@8bit graphics card). I just wrote the scenes, rendered at very very small resolution and when it "looked" good, I ran it overnight. The raytracer I used was a shareware program called "Vivid". :-(
Haven't done any rendering in ages, I'm just not artistical.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
ETA: 2010
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Stupid me, I doon't have it set up to log in at work. Oh well.
http://www.TMPGEnc.com
Awesome encoder for windows and free.
Currently the TOP of 98% of software encoders in terms of quality.
I have rendered user interface components for games with POV-Ray. Basically I have built a .inc files which consist of the interface primitives (some macro "functions"). The .pov files contain the real user interface components. Using a config.inc and some scripts you can parametrize the whole system. You can change textures, sizes, lighting and so forth on by editing the config.inc and render the components with one shell script. Also, it is easy to produce nice alpha masks (to get rig of the background) to the components by fiddling with textures and lighting. It doesn't take too many lines of code to combine the masks and the images (in PNG format). You know, a rendering pipeline, a programmer compatible way doing graphics, beats Photoshop anytime :)
POV-Ray can also be used as a plain texture generator.
I wish that POV-Ray had a more powerful macro language. Or, awwwww, maybe even a proper scripting language. At the moment you have to use all sorts of external magic to generate POV-Ray files to get what you want.
I saw someone else say the same thing, but can't hunt back to their post to reply. Oh Well.
;-)
Anyway, I first used POV in 1993, and it got me hooked on the whole computer thing. I'd never have learned Perl except to auto-generate my POV scripts. I'd never have learned Unix except so I could run POV on the university RS6000's instead of the 386DX's. Gee, I owe my career to POV!
Comp.graphics.raytracing, and later comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing were the two best newgroups I ever read, and epitomised all that was (note the past tense!) good about usenet. I wrote a tutorial for POV 2.0 when it came out, and helped set up a web competition still going today (http://www.irtc.org/).
The people were friendly and helpful, flame wars were almost unheared of and religious technology wars were rare. People joined the community, stayed in the community, and helped others enter the community.
People wrote a plethora of supporting utilities, and it really was an application that brought an otherwise inaccessible area of computing within reach of anyone.
Today, CGI is so common in film and TV that POV-Ray's images have little wow factor. Low-end commercial tools like strata 3D are much more affordable and accessible.
Nonetheless, raytracing still produces images with a unique feel, and I'm sure people still get enormous pleasure (and excellent spatial reasoning practice!!) from using POV-Ray. Unless they've changed it radically, the Scene Description Language used by POV was one of the most elegant and well designed declaritive languages I've ever come across in computing. XML and every configuration file I've seen is an ugly hack in comparison. And don't even mention VRML
Go go POV team!!!!
-----
Has anybody ever used POV-Ray as an output device in a software project?
I mean, I always thought that it would be a great way to visualize data.
Just crunch your numbers, feed them into POV-Ray via a script, display the image.
I'm curious...
There's a dedicated news server at news.povray.org (files there do not post to Usenet and your regular news server). Point your favorite news reading application there and download the groups, there are groups for exactly this, posting still renderings, animations, and plenty of technical discussion groups. I've seen some fantastic ray tracings posted here.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Still insanely easy to do if you make enough transparent objects and raise the number of times a ray can split as it passes through such items (try setting max_trace_level to 100 from it's very low "normal" value.) I had a scene of different colored glass slabs that just didn't look right with the default value. Looks great with max_trace_level at 100, but rendering about 100 small frames for animation took a month on a Pentium 166. It still bogs down my AMD, a large still of the same model can take days.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
http://wired.st-and.ac.uk/~spurdie/
In the UK.
NAN filed for bankrupcy and doesnt look like its coming back.
Regardless of how wonderful Blender was.. Not enough of us was willing to pay to keep it alive.
Oh, and there were export scripts..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
well there's a list of ftp mirrors heredont know about the www site though.
Ok, so it's a horrible joke, but when I thought Mel(Maya embedded scripting) -> Pel, it just wasn't as cute ;)
G
The Mac version is a Carbon application, so it doesn't have the characteristic speedy feel of a true Unix application, but hey it's still POV so I can't really disparage it. Hopefully the developers will see fit to make a Cocoa version of the program for a future release.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Back when I was on my amiga, rendering (raytracing) let's say "a typical nice image" back then would require me ~30min-1h per frame without trying to optimize the scene and all.
:) ).
:).
Today you get 200X faster processors, yes, but at the same time, you get caustics, radiosity, Subsurface Scattering, Volumetrics and loads of plugins/shaders that are sometimes *very* Cpu intensive. These things are an evolution of the rendering pipeline that arrived because of a lot of R&D but also because more power is available to plug these new features in (rendering hair 10 years ago was a simple polygon with hair texture on it, or polygon strands that looked terrible
So while the CPUs right now are going faster and faster, the evolution of the quality and complexity of the images also went up at the same time, thus cancelling the speed increase for mid to high-end work.
Production houses still require a renderfarm, testing some specific scenes still requires to reduce the resolution to something very small or to sample limited region in the camera viewport.
Of course if you don't want to do any raytracing and do simple model and lighting and make it look quake-like, you won't need a renderfarm, for a flying logo with nothing fancy, it's hell of a lot faster, but for most 3D artists, they still have a good excuse to go to the coffee machine
I don't know about POVRay, I've always been a lightwave user, but if they've catched up with the new rendering algorythms for the above features I mentionned, they are going to tax the cpu as much as raytracing taxed machines in the mid 80s.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Sorry about the extra spaces in these URLs...
b /p ovray/Official/r ror/povray/povray /Official/f tp.povray.or g/povray/Official/s /raytracing/povray/O fficial// povray/Off icial// povray/O fficial/r ay/Officia l/
http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.povray.org/pu
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mi
ftp://sunsite.wits.ac.za/pub/mirrors/
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/graphic
ftp://ftp.etsimo.uniovi.es/pub/raytrace
ftp://kermit.stud.fh-heilbronn.de/mirrors
ftp://ring.asahi-net.or.jp/pub/misc/pov
The yearbook committee payed a lot of money
You graduated high school without learning how to spell "paid"?
Yes, it's a troll.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Why not add a standard clause to all licenses that says if you can't be located by email (provided at the time of contribution) at any time within one month (or two or three), we have the right to change your license to anything else we damn well please (as long as it's less restrictive).
It got hammered and was down briefly. But the maintainer redid the server to use more of the memory on the box and got it back up pretty quickly. I saw it, and that it was down. Within half-an-hour of that it was back.(He mentioned it was unstable with all the RAM enabled, but unstable is better than just plain not there)
Everybody knows that the CLiT are a bunch of cocksmokers.
He appears to have a bunch of GIFs. Should he be using open-source PNGs? For shame, Taco!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Those were the days though -- models built using a ripped-off copy of 3-D Studio, exported as CSV files (if I recall correctly), manipulated using a bunch of Modula-2 utilities I wrote and rendered using surface textures that had to be created via trial and error.
Hasn't changed that much since those days - there's still plenty of fuckwits like yourself around.
Someone look at this and tell me how you can tell it's not a picture...
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
"I spent many hours mucking about with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so my guess is those render times don't suck as bad." Who the fuck CARES, you egomaniacal fucking dork?
Pros use POV-Ray? *cough*
Here's a nickel, kid. Go get yourself a real open source renderer.
('Scuse the n00b-ness - how to cancel a post on slashdot?) Here are the links properly formatted - I'm used to newsgroups where I just post a URL and the reader makes it a link... oh, and ./ seems to reformat the line returns in posts.
Black Seas Barracuda
Phalanx
Auto Chassis
Ice Planet
Way back before I made the jump to Linux I wrote a VB application that will generate a Sierpinski curve. It plots the curve on the screen in any colour you choose. Plus it outputs POV-Ray source code so you can render the curve in glorious 3D! The curve is composed of cylinders and spheres.v e.htm to see it.
I just tried to install it under WINE and was not successful, but I did not try very hard.
I keep promising myself I'm going to write a version of this for Linux someday...
http://web2.airmail.net/jfox/sierpcur
Don't be harsh about the website, I was just a kid!
Read the goddamned faq. No, you can't delete posts. Once you post, your ass belongs to Hemos.
Since Slashdot is full of no talent losers, why do you expect anything?
And there's a channel #povray on EFnet. It's a little slow nowadays, but is picking up a little.
Did I wait for that. As of late, they had not made available
a copy of the beta 3.5 for Linux. And the old Betas had
all expired. Win & Mac users had update beta's thought.
I started a couple scenes in 3.5 which I just had to freeze
while I waited for this one.
-><- no
criteria of the Open Source
Definition.
The POVray license contains:
which collides with 3 of the OSD:
Further on, the POVray license also contains
This collides with 1 of the OSD:
Moray rocks, pretty cheap too.
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
Thanks everyone...
Here's the video (2.8 MB). It should take about 10 more minutes to ftp up. There is no soundtrack, so I'll give the narration here:
The satellite is called GEMstar and was designed to provide SMS-like messaging all over the world. It was built circa 1994-5 and was lost when the rocket blew up. That didn't stop me from producing the video of what it would have looked like!
The video shows a couple of stages that occur when the satellite is released from the rocket. First, it initially tumbles. Then the solar panels deploy (like everything else, they had to be squeezed in to fit in the nosecone of the rocket). The attitude control system (ACS) turns on and stabalizes the spin of the satellite so that it faces towards the earth. This is done with momentum wheels (heavy wheels inside the satellite) and torq coils (coils that act against the earth's magnetic field). Next, the main helicial antenna is deployed, and it's ready for service!
A few notes on the parts of the satellite. The blue panels are solar cells. The gold ring at the bottom is the seperation ring that attaches the whole thing to the rocket. The 4 white squares on top are GPS antennas connected to a special receiver that can measure the phase difference between the antennas and therefore figure out (not only x,y,z and time) its pitch, roll, and yaw. The X-shaped thing on the top of the satellite is a gravity gradient boom. Deployment of this probably should have been in the video, but oh well. It pops out maybe 10 feet and, due to some simple physics I don't understand, will help orient the satellite so that it faces the earth. (In reality, the satellite isn't staying still, it has to constantly re-aim to keep pointing at the earth). On the side panel, the little circle is a window for the earth sensor. There is another one on the other side, and they help orient the satellite.
Antennas- The 4 blade antennas are for command & control. These form a broad pattern and are useful to talk to the satelite when the main antennas aren't pointed correctly (like when there is a problem). Being a broader pattern, they require more power.
The boom antenna has two elements - a larger 150 Mhz antenna to receive transmissions from ground users (who transmit on less licensed taxicab-like frequencies), and a smaller ~400 MHz transmit antenna at the tip. This antenna was the hardest part of the animation because there were no 'spiral' primitives in POVray. I ended up writing a little program in C to generate a bunch of triangle strips, and then used 4 copies of this (at 90, 180, and 270 degrees). The deployment is totally bogus - I just scaled the structure, when in reality the width of the strips don't change.
True story: our competitor at the time was Orbital with their series of ORBcomm satellites. They used a similar antenna structure, but theirs folded up sideways, like a staw that has been rolled up. Our antenna was made of metal, plastic, and fiberglass - theirs was made of copper tape, kapton (a space-rated scotch tape), and bamboo. I never thought that anyone would fly a wooden satellite!
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