Slashdot Mirror
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."
If povray is open source then why does Debian have it in the non-free category?
I remember when I was at uni in the 90's and I wanted to benchmark this new 32bit linux thing, I used POV ray as it gave out handy timings at the end of a render. I used the same scene on both win 95 and linux. Linux was 3 times faster on the same machine.
Seems like povray is used for many cool things.
e.g. rendering mars. Also done here
I'm a big fan of POV-Ray. I've been using it for years to illustrate chemistry through on-line animations.
Omnis amans amens
Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.
I'd consider it far better than most of what goes for "pro" today.
Sure the pro ones can claim all kinds of features that are barely more than excuses to use patents, but when it comes down to best image quality, povray is 2nd to none
of the day when complex POV scenes can be rendered by hardware at 1920x1080 @ 60 fps.
Will that day come in the next 40 years, or even ever ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Speaking of re-implementations, though, consider that the latest whiz-bang GPUs from NVIDIA and ATI can put together images of essentially the quality of those shown in the POV-RAY hall of fame in real-time. A great re-implementation would be a POV-Ray to OpenGL translator that uses vendor-specific extensions as necessary to let your video card handle the actual mathematics of rendering. If done well, it could also be applied to animation sequences instead of just static images, and the result would be a very fast, high-quality, low-cost rendering solution.
Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.
:-)
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.
A different approach giving different sorts of results, and while POV-Ray might not be suitable for, say, modelling, animating and rendering feature films, it can be used to create some quirky, glorious images. Who cares if it's not some carbon-copy of Maya or Renderman - an alternative approach is always appreciated.
People are always complaining about 'programmer art'. With POV-Ray, programming is visual art.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
For even more consise examples, check out the POVRay short code contest, where they have everything from landscapes to pottery exhibits to cities to blood-cells -- each in under 256 bytes of source code.
What's really cool is that every time I've emailed him about even the stupidest POV-related item, he's replied and been super cool about it. I interviewed him a couple of years back for a website that never got around to publishing the article. One of the renders he did took nearly six months to finish. Long live the P200, I guess. :D
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
I also stand-by your "really cool about email" comment. One of his works' wasn't available in his gallery, I emailed him; and he got back to me when he did a high-res render and published it!
I have been using PovRay for many years now as well as other professional tools. I also work with coding of 3D engines.
I would say a few things in regard to PovRay.
1) It is a complete ray tracer.
2) Its interface is not as good as (some of) the pro-tools, but...
3) Its open source.
Item 1. PovRay support all you need to render images in 3D. Just look at their site, in the hall of fame. The rainy street image is amazing.
Item 2. This is probable the issue that will be discussed most. But I believe the interface developed over the years (originally I worked with PovRay way back when it didn't have a GUI) - is now at a level where it is useful for anyone who which to use it. Of cause you need to think mathematically about 3D, rather than visual. There is not any drag and drop functionality where you can add a box, a cone etc. to your scene. This scares a lot of people away, but most of the professionals I have worked with, and most of my own work, the drag-drop-icon-what-ever GUI is not really that useful. You always end up entering some popup box to insert the exact measurements of you box, cone, sphere...
Item 3. Yes! I once was in a project where we needed a 3D engine to display the results we made. (The project itself was not related to 3D at all, but we needed a good way to display the complex set of results and date.) We made it in such a way that it displayed the results as pov-ray data files, and integrated it into powray. It was awesome. I don't know of any other product that would allow you to do this. Most of the integration was related to Item 2 above, as pov-ray uses text based and script like files as input. This is ideal for programs to handle as their output. Try to do that in any other program.
In relation to all the items above, I believe you have to be slightly nerdish or mathematically minded in order to fully benefit from PovRay - but then again, welcome to Slashdot.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Apparently I picked an excellent time to look into POVRay, as it was just after 3.6 had been released. In fact the Windows distribution was still buggy and wouldn't install so I had to go with 3.5. It must have been just that day that it was released.
Anyway, I was at first put-off by the lack of a visual interface ("how the f**k are you supposed to do all that with just text?!?"), but after messing around with Moray (a visual front-end for POV), I determined that I had fewer problems just typing it all in. I think it's my experience programming versus my lack of experience with doing anything in 3D other than a few Quake maps.
Of course, I'm still limited to doing very basic things, but I'm beginning to understand the power of POV--especially the fact that it's a complete language. I find it amazing that people have written macros that will automatically generate everything from trees to whole cities.
No discussion of the excellent POV-Ray renderer would be complete without a mention of The Internet Ray-Tracing Competition, which is graciously sponsored by a member of the POV-Ray team. While POV-Ray would certainly exist without the IRTC, it is questionable whether the reverse is true.
On a personal note, I'd like to echo all of the positive comments about POV-Ray. Around 1988, I began writing my own ray-tracer, in Modula-2 of all things. But then I ran across POV-Ray on a BBS, and realized that I'd spend the rest of my life eating their dust and sniffing their butt fumes, so I dropped mine and have never regretted it. POV-Ray stands out among its kin--not perfect by any means, but excellent nevertheless.
I really don't think that game graphics are anywhere near the level of high-quality raytraced images. If I'm wrong, please post screenshots. The graphics in Far Cry, as an example, are the best I've seen, but not as good as quality ray-traced images.
I don't know if you know this, but the methods of raytracing and those used in 3D games are pretty different in how they work, from what I understand. Raytracing is also quite different from most 3D rendering applications. POVRay uses relatively "pure" mathematical models rather than models made of just tons of triangles, from what I understand (I'm admitedly pretty new to 3D graphics, though). It has some really amazing light modeling as well. I don't know if it could be done to make raytracing work in OpenGL or D3D or anything like that. It will probably be quite a few years before raytracing can be done in real time. Eventually, and probably within my lifetime (I'm 24), computer game graphics will reach or very closely approach photorealism, though. And I can't wait.
Also, POV can generate animation, though I haven't gotten it to work yet, as I've only been working in POVRay for a little while. I've been having lots of fun tinkering and studying it, however.
I'd rather see OpenGL concentrating on emulating those vendor-specific extensions to standardise them -- essentially putting some of a renderer like povray into opengl, rather than opengl into povray.
To me, it's important to have emulated features for development. We can't buy every card. I've always thought that an OS should emulate hardware features as far as it possibly can -- just think how useful fake CD drives are.
Sorry but the only one of those that got lighting even close to correct is the fourth one. The first one was looking good until I looked at the rocks under the waters surface and they looked more like watercolors than renderings.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Show me a GPU that turns a 24KB input file into this and I might be inclined to believe you.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
When I had to teach Computer Graphics (circa POV-Ray 3.1) I found it a great way of getting kids to see how all the concepts involved in 3D computing came into being without having to worry too much about those with weak programming skills. (This was an issue at the place I was teaching at).
Each type of concept (eg merging primitive objects/translucency etc) can be introduced one at a time into the text script file with instant pretty pictures to look at as output.
They could also take the program home with them and the nerdier ones could try running it on their linux distros too ;-) This was a huge advantage
over any commercial packages.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
I've been using Povray for years. Initialy because it was the only ray-tracer available to me, but later on because I could create high quality images and animations programmaticaly by producing scene files from aplications.
I like it because I can pretend for a moment that Im an artist, and not a geek. Even though I'm editing what looks like a programming language to the casual observer.
Currently I'm using it to produce animated alpha channel sprites for a game, and having a ball.
http://www.pingball.com
Pov-ray can do soft shadows by doing shadow ray tests at every point sampled, with the light source moved slightly at each sample. It also can compute global illumination using a radiosity-like algorithm (they call it radiosity, but I'm not sure it's a true radiosity algorithm, path tracing perhaps?) They also have photon mapping, which is in many ways superior to radiosity (lower computational complexity, can simulate non-diffuse interreflections). I haven't tried photon mapping, though.
Radiosity
Area Lights
Photons
-jim
I know you're joking, but these people really did make a ray tracer where you can change the value of c. They have a few animations where they set the speed of light to small values like 1m/s.
-jim
POV is one of the greatest free software programs available, but people usually look at it the wrong way (IMHO).
What stops people generally is that it has no visual modeling facility. This leads people to believe that it is only good as a renderer where the input is created by some visual modeling tool like Moray, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While you certainly can use POV as an ordinary backend renderer, the true fun and power of the program comes with hand-written scene description files.
Yes, hand-written.
You can accomplish in 20 lines of POV code things that would take hours with a visual modeling interface. It's all about procedural descriptions rather than visual construction. Take some time and look through the many excellent sample scenes that are included, then start out by making small changes to the code and rendering them to see how it looks with your change.
Most of the best images created with POV were not done using a modeling program but hand written scene descriptions.
POV is a programming language for scenes the way C is a programming language for computer programs, and it really is a full-blown programming language (though a little unusual in places I will admit).
While things like modeling complex organic forms (the human body for example) are generally impractical to do procedurally, you can do just about anything else this way, and often much more easily and with more control than you would have positioning a lot of points in space iwth a modeling program.
And if you have any interest in the more abstract artistic kind of compositions, you can do just amazing things in a single page of POV code. The ability to use conditional and looping stuctures along with macros and functions in your scene description gives you amazing power.
And as far as GUIs go, at least POV for Windows has one of the best designed and most functional GUI interfaces that I've used. It's not a modeler, but as an interface to the POV renderer and even as a general purpose code editor it is superb.
One of POV's best uses (and most overlooked ones) is as an introductory programming environment for children. You can quickly show a child a program that creates 100 reflective transparent randomly colored spheres randomply positioned, and then show them how to change one or another of the parameters that control the apperance or number of spheres, and they can iteratively experiment with changes and rendering their results.
It's simple programming with a visual payoff.
G.
Heck, POV-Ray was what inspired me (way back) to upgrade from that 386DX-33 to the 486DX2-66 with a 2 meg Diamond Viper VESA card so I could display 800x600 in 24 bit(!) :) I also love the fact that, as opposed to most other (triangle / polygon based) renderers, POV-Ray's primitives are perfect shapes (i.e. a sphere in POV-Ray is a perfect sphere, not some sort of polygon based construct with Gourad shading) unless of course you intentionally build up objects from its triangle primitive.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
To borrow a wittism from another Slashdot story. An amateur pays attention to his tools, while a professional pays attention to his art.
Professional:=commercial.
"1. Of or pertaining to a profession, or calling; conforming to the rules or standards of a profession; following a profession; as, professional knowledge; professional conduct. ``Pride, not personal, but professional.'' --Macaulay. ``A professional sneerer.'' --De Quincey."