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.

Just remember...

[cca93014]

...rendering a glass sphere over a chequered floor has NEVER been done before. Try it!

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

Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[Deagol]

I think Moray is featured on the site. Haven't used either, though. I craft my spheres and checkerboard floors by hand, thank you very much.

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?

[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: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. :-)

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:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?

[drix]

I cordially invite you to join my "Slashdot Nerd Get a Sense of Humor" support group, which I will be opening on Yahoo! Groups later today.

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: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)

Duckpins II?

[dattaway]

When is the sequel?

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...

[frovingslosh]

That seems to have posted everything I didn't care about and left out the main point: So what is new in Povray 3.5?

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...

[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: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.

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 :)

-

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.

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.

Whack-a-server advanced...

[stienman]

I get the distinct impression the slashdot editors are playing advanced "Whack-A-Server" lately.

-Adam

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: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.

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??

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.

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?"

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.

Looks like the Povray's been Slashdotted...

[zulux]

I copied the screen shots:

1st Screenshot:

Blue Sky

Reflective-Ball

Ground Made of Grid Lines

2nd Screenshot:

Star Feild
Ball
Ball
Reflective-Ball

Ball

Ground made of Grid-Lines

3rd Screenshot:

Fog

Top side of Cube
Fog
Left Side of Cube
Right Side of Cube
Fog
Water with waves in it

LamnessFilter: fka;jdk;dskdsjnxz.,nweqhkljasdnm,Z.fdhjfahvcmv,znc xvhjlkafhdscnxz.mcn,mvxhfsjalkfhkvanc,.zn
dfsafds afdsfdsafjdsa;lfkdsafkd;lkdsaj
fsdak;jdsfkljdsa;l fjds;lfsa;lksajfk4eu8cxvzjk

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!!!!

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.