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!

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)

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.

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?

Whack-a-server advanced...

[stienman]

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

-Adam

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: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?"

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

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.