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

Good fun

[atcurtis]

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.

POV Ray!

[Qwerpafw]

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.

Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[DG]

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

I remember...

[superdoo]

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?

Re:I remember...

[Alsee]

POV smacking them in the head with Moore's Law?

I started out on POV with a 486SX-33. The SX series had no floating point math unit. I spent a WEEK rendering a 120 frame animation, prolly 160 by 120 pixels. I immediately mailed away for a top-of-the-line 486-DX66 (does have the math unit) for $660. I was then able to render the same animation in about 12 hours. Now-a-days I could prolly render it at 640x480 while I eat a snack :)

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Rendering Times...

[phraktyl]

I spent many hours mucking about with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so I guess is those render times don't suck as bad.

Not necessarily. I've been using POV-Ray for years, and while the machines have gotten faster, the scenes have gotten more complex with regards to reflection and such, and I'm using more anti-aliasing right along with it. Offhand, I'd say my render times are roughly about the same as they were nearly 10 years ago.

And don't forget Fractint!

[farrellj]

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

Cluster POVray

[nate1138]

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??

Re:Can POV model hair yet?

[cybermace5]

You can make hair easily.

You just use the method that realtime designers use for 3D hardware: transparent shells.

How to make a hairy sphere in POV-Ray:
1. Make a sphere.
2. Make a while loop, which makes more spheres, each one a tiny bit bigger than the last.
3. These spheres have a pigment map with a spot pattern. Scale the pattern way down, tweak the color thresholds until the spots are small enough. Your spheres are going to be transparent with the spot pigment being the desired hair color.
4. The spheres are stacked on each other close together, and the spots on the spheres line up and look like hairs.

The results can really be quite striking. By shifting the surface while scaling it, you can slant the hairs. Throw in gradual amounts of turbulence, and you can introduce irregularities like messy fur. This method works very well for making carpet, too. Have fun!

Re:If you aren't familiar with povray...

[rabidcow]

Also check out http://www.oyonale.com/

Gilles Tran has done incredible stuff with POV-Ray. (plus there's all those funky stories in the book of beginnings)

Today's Games = Yesterday's POV

[Control-Z]

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.

Re:povray is not open source

[Neon Spiral Injector]

The Mozilla project was around 2 or 3 years when they went to change their license. POV-Ray has been around for at least 11 or 12 years now. It may be a bit harder to track down everyone who has writen code for it.

But as you can see parkrrrr says they are working on a rewrite that will get rid of the old code, so it may be licenced differently in the future.

Re:povray is not open source

[parkrrrr]

A little more than ten years, if we're to believe the keychain in my pocket that says "1991-2001". That dates to before the commercial success of the Internet, so many of the contributors were only on Compuserve. Finding some of those people by their names alone would be very difficult, because their names are so common, and we don't have any other reliable contact information now that Compuserve has all but ceased to exist.

Best software project ever

[Jon Peterson]

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!!!!