POV-Ray 3.6 Released

ehmdjii writes "After a long betatesting-phase the POV-Ray team just released version 3.6 of the popular opensource raytracer. It's been two years since the last version and many bugs have been fixed as well as some changes in the render core. This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations."

Comments

Great, for a free package

[Anonymous Coward]

Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.

Re:Great, for a free package

[ron_ivi]

"'The Wet Bird' ... I can't even imagine putting those images together using POV-Ray. Using 3dsmax, sure. But POV-Ray? Wow."

Gilles Tran, the artist who made 'The Wet Bird' piece has a wonderful 9-page series of web pages on The Making of the Web Bird He's one of the best 3D artists our there in any media. You can see more of his gallery here

Re:Great, for a free package

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to support this guy, he sells his work through zazzle

Re:Great, for a free package

[Anonymous Coward]

Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there,...

Do you mean suff like this?
free, open sourced and professional

Re:Great, for a free package

[david.given]

POV-Ray's a bit different from usual 3D rendering and modelling software, in that a lot of the effort has gone into making a programming language which can then be used to generate objects. Typical renderers strive to render as many triangles as possible as quickly as possible, while POV-Ray gives you an entire programming environment. For instance, while a typical 3D modeller might laboriously hand-craft a tree out of triangles, shaders and alpha-blended foliage textures, a POV-Ray user would effectively write a program for generating trees.

This has some unexpected advantages: firstly, CSG trees are very efficient on space, so it's perfectly possible to create a single complex tree and then instantiate it a thousand times with different scaling factors, textures etc and the scene graph will still contain a single tree; and secondly, since POV primitives are mathematically perfect, the can be scaled arbitrarily and will remain mathematically perfect.

A while back I had a passion for rendering planets. To scale. I used a POV unit of 1.0 for a kilometre. So I made a sphere 12000 units in diameter, put a light source 150x10^6 units away, put a camera .002 units above the sphere's surface... and it all worked. Fast, too. You can't do that in Blender.

The only thing I couldn't work out was how to match light intensities to physical units, but I'm sure it's possible. Plus some of the textures seemed to go a little funny, probably due to rounding errors...

Re:Great, for a free package

[squidfrog]

ml-POV, a patched version of POV-Ray, allows you to use high dynamic range images (HDRI) for lighting--that's about as close as you'll get to real-world lighting in POV-Ray right now. I also wrote a pseudo-solution for the standard POV-Ray.

Re:Great, for a free package

[h_jurvanen]

The only thing that gave it away as a computer rendered image was that all the blinds of the first building were at one of several different levels.

Actually, even that isn't a good giveaway. Some buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, one of the architects responsible for the modern "glass box building," were designed so that the blinds could only be drawn to certain levels, thus enforcing a rather homogeneous look. MvdR was extremely influential, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are quite a few buildings with similar characteristics.

Great POV-Ray artist:

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at this site:

http://www.oyonale.com/
http://www.oyonale.com/ histoire/francais/index.htm

Gorgeous stuff! All rendered with POV-Ray!

Re:PovRay OpenSource?

[t_allardyce]

Its not GPL, it was started years ago under a different license.

This happened some days ago now

[Anonymous Coward]

The source is, however, still unavailable for version 3.6

Re:This happened some days ago now

[noselasd]

Download page says "Note: this is the version 3.5 source code.
The version 3.6 source code will be made available within a few weeks."

And their ftp server tell us:
"With the POV-Ray 3.6 release on 9 June 2004, source is not
immediately available. It will be released shortly. If you
want source code, you could look in our old versions dirs."

So, be patient.

Gilles Tran!

[Ford Prefect]

I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran, creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...

Highly recommended!

Re:Gilles Tran!

[afidel]

I remember rendering the trainstation demo on my 486-SX25. Thing took 7 days to complete at 800*600 3 ray no AA. Today I can render that image at 1600*1200 insane ray level with full multipass AA and it will only take seconds. Kind of puts computing performance increases into perspective.

Re:PovRay OpenSource?

[SLi]

POV-Ray is not open source. The license forbids, among others, commercial distribution. In fact now that I read the 3.6 license, it seems to forbid distribution, PERIOD.

This seems to be an interesting contrast to this comment where someone (apparently a POV-Ray developer?) discusses plans to release POV-Ray under an open source license and explains why this is not currently possible:

"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."

Re:I'm still dreaming

[MooKore 2004]

These guys managed to do 512x384@20 fps, using a logical 36Ghz processor.

Re:PovRay OpenSource?

[zz99]

POV-Ray is not open source

POV-Ray is not free software. But it seems to be open source. At their web site there are links that seems to point at the source

IRTC

[Lord_Dweomer]

Also, for those of you who want to see some examples of some quality (and not so quality) raytracing work, a lot of it down in POV Ray, check out the Internet Ray Tracing Competition over at www.irtc.org.

Day will come sooner than you may think

[Animaether]

nVidia Gelato
Mental Ray taking advantage of OTS hardware
Dedicated raytracing hardware
Raytraced Quake 3
OpenRT realtime raytracing framework

Too little too late....

[imsabbel]

8 Years ago powray was slow, but quality wise better than most commercial renderers.
Since then not much has changed with povray, but A LOT with the rest.
Now povray is still slow as hell (the radiosity core is RIDICULOUS. it takes longer per scanline then others per picture while still having artifacts)

Look here:
http://www.pointzero.nl/renderers/
and find at least 10 other open source renderers that were developed in less time than the povray-tram needed for this half-assed update, are 10 times faster (or 100 times if you use some sort of GI) and feature the ability to render stuff other than their own format (e.g. plugins for blender/3ds/ect).

Re:Too little too late....

[Anonymous Coward]

'Tis the first time I'm here at Slashdot, so please forgive me for using the "Anonymous Coward" Account...

There are a few things you should notice BEFORE claiming that POV-Ray is slow and especially, "half-assed".

POV-Ray makes no use of a Graphics Card GPU, but relies solely on the CPU. Why? Because the double-floating point precision isn't supplied on a GPU.

Why is radiosity faster on commercial apps making use of the scanline-technique? Because their just showing f***ing triangles, which can be rushed through the GPU. POV-Ray needs to raytrace everything.

So instead of dropping careless comments like "slow as hell", think about what POV-Ray CAN do and WHY it does things the way it does. And then, please, realize that many things like Photon-Mapping, Radiosity et al were implemented in POV-Ray long before any commercial app thought about it.

And finally: POV-Ray costs niente, nothing, nada, whereas Maya, 3DSMax and whatnot cost hundreds of dollars. Think about who's on the legal side when using those apps. I doubt that everyone making images with Maya actually has it, that aside, you must be rich to jump between Maya, 3DSMax and Cinema4D to get the different benefits of the app, whereas in POV-Ray, you can tweak almost everything to get what you want.

So, please, before commenting on a RAYTRACER next time, don't compare it to a SCANLINE RENDERER. There is a huge technical difference.

Regards,
TimNikias v2.0

Re:Too little too late....

[JDevers]

I agree with most of your comments (and your sentiment...don't bash it, its FREE!!! Fix it if you want to gripe about a feature) but no commercial app really uses the GPU in quite the way you ascribe, at least currently. When you render a Maya image, it is being done completely in software. The previews may be being massively accellerated in hardware, but the final image is ALL done in software (unless you have one of those extremely expensive hardware RT boxes...which the typical person doesn't). Now obviously they don't have to raytrace everything, but even when using a real raytracing renderer (like Mental Ray), they are quite fast...faster than POVRay. I'm NOT complaining though...just backing up his statement...

Re:Woo!

[cammoblammo]

POV-Ray doesn't have a GUI, but GUI front ends have been written for it. I've used the KDE Povray modeller which is sort of nice, but I found I had to learn the language first, by which time I found it easier to just use the language. It's not that reliable, either. Good try though.

Re:PovRay OpenSource?

[Doppleganger]

If you're going to discuss distribution terms, you might want to look at the distributor's license. It has a lot of legalese in it (and IANAL), but it looks like it has fairly lenient terms for inclusion into an open-source OS distribution.

The header of the license you linked points out that it is for end-users only, not distributors.

Re:PovRay OpenSource?

[SLi]

POV-Ray is not open source according to the generally recognized definition of open source.

Satisfied?

Note true. Read the distribution terms

[SeanDuggan]

Rules on distribution found inside the license page, or here.

Basically, they require you to get permission to distribute it commercially, or even as a file posted on your webpage or P2P software, but you're free to give it out to your students, your peons, or your friends.

I'd like to provide text, but the formatting they have there... it would likely come out horribly mangled here. But follow the link and look at section 3.1

there is competetion

[golgafrincham]

hm, i'd rather stick with yafray, it's open source, has a nicer language (ok, depends on taste) and is (somewhat) integrated into blender. and the results are simply amazing.

::shaking head::

[Ayanami Rei]

The textures, lighting effects, reflection maps, etc. are all pre-created (did you ever wonder why 3d Mark is a 250+ MB download?).

That's not nearly the same kind of thing.

POV-Ray generates the shadows, lighting, and often the textures, right on the spot. So a very short input file can generate a realistic 3d scene. And it does it using raytracing, so you get _real_ reflections, bump maps, and shadows. None of this is being done with GPUs, they still use precalulated texture maps and a scanline renderer (which is fine for interactive presentation and games... but again, all the hard work is done up front by the creator of the game/application/etc.)

Re:::shaking head::

[j1m 5n0w]

I already mentioned this in another post, but these people created a ray tracer with non-instantaneous values of c, like 1m/s. They have a few interesting animations on their site that simulate doppler shift and some of the relativistic effects that occur when travelling at speeds approaching c.

-jim

Re:What this really means ... ;-)

[EvilTwinSkippy]

You will occasionally hear a game engine claim to use ray tracing. What they do in that case is bounce a beam from the camera to check if a polygon is visible. It's not the same thing.

I've been ray tracing since BOB, a precursor to pov-ray that was published as floppies bundled with a textbook. Back when a complex vga resolution render would take a few days on a 386.

The theory hasn't changed much. Just the efficiency of the algorythems, and of course, the horsepower of the computers.

Re:What this really means ... ;-)

[JDevers]

He didn't say that games do it, he said that the GPUs can do it. Look at some of the tech demos...

Specifically, have a look at:
http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/rx800.html

Click on the Quicktime of the Ruby demo...

You want to click on "the doublecross" this is a realtime rendering that can be done on the newest ATI GPUs. Alternatively, if you HAVE one of the newest ATI GPUs, download the executables and watch them render in realtime...

I'll agree it isn't perfect yet, but it is a big step above Far Cry...The demo itself actually looks a little bit better than this MPEG4 because of the lossy nature of the codec (and the not quite photorealistic nature of the images).

GPLed POV-Ray?

[slavemowgli]

This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations.

So... does this mean there's hope for a GPL-ed POV-Ray? IIRC, the main reason why it's distributed under those restrictive terms was that the developers have no means anymore to get in contact with some authors who still have a significant amount of code in there, so they cannot get their OK for a licensing change.

Are they going to redo those parts now and adopt a more open development model? I'd love that.

GUI

[squidfrog]

Moray's an excellent modeller for POV-Ray. The author does a great job of keeping up with the latest capabilities of POV, even when major features are added. You can use photons, radiosity, etc., all without hand-editing the resulting POV-code. But for those who do enjoy writing POV-code by hand, Moray's convenient for those situations where you wonder what command you need to do X, and where exactly it goes in the code...

Holy *#%@#$%!

[emarkp]

Thanks for the link! Not the Ruby clip. Check out the Subsurface Scattering demo. That's some of the most impressive work to come out of Siggraph in the past few years, and one of the reasons Gollum looked so good in LotR. See here for more.

Implemented in a video card in real time? Wow. I'm impressed.

yafray docs

[golgafrincham]

Also, POV-Ray comes with documentation (fancy that!).

there is documentation, just not on the yafray pages ;) yafray docs