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.

Comments

POV

[prestomation]

For all you newcomers, POV stands for Persistence-Of-Vision.

If you aren't familiar with povray...

[pavos]

...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.

Text of article...

[Anonymous Coward]

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]

Re:Text of article...

[maxwell demon]

So what is new in Povray 3.5?

Quoting the headlines from the New Features page:

• 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

If you want to know more, you have to read the whole page yourself.

POV 3.5

[Agent_Eight]

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.

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 /. 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.

Re:seems http of povray.org is already slashdotted

[semicolon]

In the mean time http://povray.co.uk is still up and will quench your appetite for 3.5 news.

povray is not open source

[JoeBuck]

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.

Re:povray is not open source

[Agent_Eight]

It's not as restricting as you make it out to be. The source is available to anyone. Yes, there are restrictions as to how you build it. For instance, you can't use the POVengine as the core of your own program. POV was designed as an individual entity. Yes, you can write your own extensions that link to the program via API hooks ... The Moray modeling program is an example of this.

As far as scene files and generated images ... hey your free to do whatever you want with the images. The Scene Description Language (SDL) files can be distributed as well. The language specification itself on the other hand is obviously something they don't want you to copy, but what did you expect.

Hang around the POV newsgroups, you'll find it to be a very friendly and supportive community. A good number of those on the development team are there to answer questions. I've been hooked on POV since 92 and I'll continue to support them in whatever way possible.

Re:povray is not open source

[parkrrrr]

It's true that POV is not open source. There's a very good reason for that: we can't reach many of the people who contributed the original code under the old license, so we don't have the right to just switch the license. We'll have to rewrite some pretty big chunks of code before we can think about a more open license. That (the rewrite) is slated to happen for the next major release.

As for the object files, I think that if you read carefully you'll find that the only restrictions are on the use of the files in the samples directory; the POV-Team doesn't own the copyright on those files so the restrictions on those files are an unfortunate necessity. The standard include files and macros, though, are free to be used for any purpose:

The user is also granted the right to use the scene files, fonts,
bitmaps, and include files distributed in the INCLUDE and
SCENES\INCDEMO sub-directories in their own scenes. Such permission
does not extend to any other files in the SCENES directory or its
sub-directories. The SCENES files are for your enjoyment and
education but may not be the basis of any derivative works unless the
file in question explicitly grants permission to do such.

Re:I remember...

[Sabalon]

I used to render some stuff on my 386-33, and then at the last Atlanta Linux Showcase (1998?) they had some beowulf cluster or something running. The display showed something that looked like a quilt of liquid metal with reflections being rendered. It was moving around as if alive.

Then they said that each frame (at about 30fps) was being rendered real-time by PoV.

Had what you were talking about taking Lightwave from a 486DX4-20 to a dual PentiumPro200 machine. Slow as hell now :)

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[parkrrrr]

Moray's not open source, but it is a nice POV-centric modeler. There are also utilities to convert objects created in other modelers to be used with POV; lots of people use those to create objects and then glue it all together with some hand coding.

There have been attempts to create open source modelers for POV in the past, but they were collaborative projects from the start and the unfortunate truth behind open source is that it seems to work best if one person does a lot of the design and coding before getting all those eyes to debug. Design by committee just seems to lead to stagnation.

Personally, I do it all by hand, when I actually have time to use POV as opposed to helping write it.

Re:Let's see your ray traces

[aridhol]

Go to www.irtc.org, where they have an ongoing raytracing competition. Not all of it is Povray, but alot of it is.

Using POV-Ray on cluster systems

[Hassan79]

There are some patches for POV-Ray that enable parallel rendering on multiple machines, unfortunately not yet for the new version:

• PVMPOV
• PvMegaPov
• MPIPOV
• MPI-Povray

I hope that there will be something like this for version 3.5 soon.

Don't forget the first povray pioneer artists

[pavos]

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.

Re:Not cool

[ForceOfWill]

from the license above linked:

The creator of a scene file retains all rights to the scene file they created, and any image generated by the Software from them.

The license does not "stipulate what you can and can't subsequently do with your own artwork." They even explain that they can't change the license until they rewrite the code completely, in the section called "WHY ISN'T POV-RAY OPEN SOURCE?"

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[toneby]

> Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...when Blender goes away, all that hard work and all those cool animations become so many random bits.

Now, go away to www.blender3d.com and read that page... and then come back and continue to read.

Yes, Blender is closed sourced, but it will be GPLed or get a similar license, with all old and new development released, hopefully this will happen soon, I long for a new dose of blender...

For those looking for a pov-modeler take a look at truevision seems pretty nice, and probably need a bunch more testing by all of you, so give him/them good bug-reports and feature requests now :)

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[jfedor]

Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...

True, but it might change soon.

-jfedor

Re:And don't forget Fractint!

[Anonymous Coward]

iirc pov had a mandelbrot texture on its own.

It does now, but it didn't when Fractint was at its best. Besides, POV's mandelbrot code is all floating point, where Fractint used integer math. Back then that made a BIG difference.

and now POV's got the julia object, which creates 3d slices of 4d fractals. (which fractint actually will do too, but nowhere near as well)

news.povray.org

[frovingslosh]

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.

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[dindinx]

I do. Giram (http://www.giram.org/)
is a GPLed Modeller, use povray as backend, and gtk+-2.0 for the gui.
Give it a try.

Re:Mutiple machines?

[parkrrrr]

3.5 still can't do that. Lots of the guts of the code just aren't threadsafe, and won't be until we do the 4.0 rewrite.

International mirrors

[parkrrrr]

Sorry about the extra spaces in these URLs...

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.povray.org/pub /p ovray/Official/
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mir ror/povray/povray /Official/
ftp://sunsite.wits.ac.za/pub/mirrors/f tp.povray.or g/povray/Official/
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/graphics /raytracing/povray/O fficial/
ftp://ftp.etsimo.uniovi.es/pub/raytrace/ povray/Off icial/
ftp://kermit.stud.fh-heilbronn.de/mirrors/ povray/O fficial/
ftp://ring.asahi-net.or.jp/pub/misc/povr ay/Officia l/