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.

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: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.