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

Things to try

[oliverthered]

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.

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[Skyshadow]

If the OSS tools aren't up to your satisfaction, why not go buy a commercial package and use it?

The strength of OSS is that you can change it to meet your needs, and that over a long enough timeline this means that it tends to evolve into what the users need it to be. As such, the tools tend to become superior to their competitors in the long run. In the meantime, assuming you're not up to making the changes yourself (don't sweat it -- I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, either), tinkering with the OSS tools and complaining is just a big waste of your time.

OSS is about freedom as in speech, but as a side effect it also allows freedom as in choice of products (which, contrary to common belief, is what really chafes Bill G's hide). Exercise that.

I 3 POV-Ray!

[cybermace5]

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!

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[FreeUser]

So many modellers have the opposite problem ... no (free as in freedom) rendering engine. For older versions of POV there were various modellers of various quality ... none quite up to Blender or Lightwave's quality IIRC, though it's been a couple of years since I've looked for one (like you, I'm now back in the market, however).

Don't say "Blender"

I agree, but not for the same reason as you. 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.

- that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.

Here I disagree. For many things Blender has the easiest interface I've seen (for others things like Lightwave are better). It is different that what users of Lightwave would be used to, but it is by no means obtuse. Indeed, things like their particle system and spline animation controls are fantastic. Just because you're used to something doesn't necessarilly mean thats the best way to go about doing it (the same goes for some Blender bigots who dismiss other modellers as well ... as far as I've seen none of the modellers have a monopoly on the Right Way to do things, and some manage to make things easy that the others complicate, by virtue of the GUI design choices made).

However, I too would be interested in a good modeller and animation choreographer frontend to POV. Perhaps its time for a few of us to get together and start throwing one together. :-)

License isn't as bad as people make it out to be

[FreeUser]

While you are correct in pointing out that POV-RAY isn't free software (and probably doesn't meet the "open source" definition either), the license isn't as draconian or bad as you make it out to be.

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:

While this explanation doesn't really belong in this document, we are asked it often enough that we have decided to put it here. While the POV-Ray(TM) source code is freely available, it isn't 'open' according to the currently popular definition of the term (meaning that it isn't available to create derivative works other than fully functional versions of POV-Ray). The reasons for this are historical. Primarily, at the time that POV-Ray(TM) was originally developed (starting in about 1990), on Compuserve, it was a different environment than today. Virtually none of the developers had internet access and there wasn't a great awareness of things like the GPL. The team at that time rolled their own license - one that allowed free use of the software but attempted to prevent people taking unfair advantage of it.

As people contributed code to POV-Ray(TM) over the years - and there have been many instances of this - they contributed it to us on the understanding that it would be covered by the POV-Ray(TM) license, as it stood at the time. Now, in 2001, we find that in many cases we don't know who wrote what part of the code, or that the author is uncontactable. We simply don't have the right to arbitrarily change the terms under which their source code is distributed. Even though it was contributed to us, we feel that we must honor the terms under which it was given. Therefore, POV- Ray(TM) will remain on this existing license until we do a full re-write (which is intended for v4), at which time a new license will be instituted that is far more liberal in terms of reuse.

[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.

Re:povray is not open source

[Agent_Eight]

Ok, I may have misunderstood your original post. Yes, the SCENES directory is mostly protected. Seems fair since it contains files that other people created and allowed to be used to demonstrate what POV was capable of. Things like this get debated all the time on the newgroups between users and the POVDEV team. DERIVITIVE works applies to throwing the whole file into something else and calling it your own. Copying bits and pieces is part of the educational process that they were provided for.

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.

Your right about the wording of the license,and yes, it's not likely to be enforced. In later versions, the license will become even more liberal (maybe even open source?)
The license does a pretty good job of explaining why the software isn't open source right now.

Thier biggest concern is with people charging for free software without letting people know they are paying for something that is free.

POV-Ray goes beyond standard rendering too

[Yes]

I have found POV-Ray to be a pretty useful tool. Most people probably think about rendering some nice scenes when POV-Ray is mentioned. Well, it can be used on other stuff too.

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.

Re:I remember...

[ceswiedler]

The corollary to Moore's law goes something like this: CPU work always expands to fill the processor time available.

I saw this in college animation courses. A project would take so many man-hours (say 400). Given a faster computer, the finished product might look better (more detailed, higher resolution, etc) but the man-hours were the same.

The effort required to produce Toy Story or Final Fantasy today is about the same effort which will be required to produce a full-length CG movie in 10 years.

If this law weren't true, we'd all be watching Tron sequels which take ten minutes to produce.