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

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.

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: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?"

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.