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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."
This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations.
Translation:
We know this shit is kind of broken, but we've cleaned it up best we can; here, we've tried to make sense of it; could someone who knows what they're doing maybe come in and rewrite it for us?
Povray, like circleMUD, is one of those software packages whose releases seem to come few and far-between, but are often worth it...
;)
I, for one, welcome our new chrome-sphere-over-checkboard overlords.
You know, a friend of mine, after I installed povray on his machine, asked me, "So, where's the GUI...?"
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
If povray is open source then why does Debian have it in the non-free category?
Take a look at this site:
/ histoire/francais/index.htm
http://www.oyonale.com/
http://www.oyonale.com
Gorgeous stuff! All rendered with POV-Ray!
Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.
I wonder if that might be more accurately stated in the reverse: Definitely better than some of the pro stuff out there, but not nearly as usable for the rank amateurs among us.
It's actually far harder to use than simple point-click-and-drag solutions like 3dsmax or Maya, but the results can be just as good. Two of my favorite POV-Ray images:
'The Wet Bird'
'Chado'
I can't even imagine putting those images together using POV-Ray. Using 3dsmax, sure. But POV-Ray? Wow.
As a long time POV-Ray user (Abuser?) I've kinda fallen off watching the development since the official felt like it slowned after the big 3.1 release. It's nice to see a strong, friendly community surrounding POV-Ray even though it pales in comparison to larger 3d programs. Even so, I still feel that learning how to use POV-Ray is a great introduction to 3d and coding.
In celebration of 3.6, I bring you this lovely scene.Thank you developers, helpers, users and everyone else within the community. You all help make POV-Ray kick ass to this very day.
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
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!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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
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.
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.
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?
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
Cool! They've changed the speed of light!
If you want to support this guy, he sells his work through zazzle
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
"Sure the pro ones can claim all kinds of features that are barely more than excuses to use patents,"
Huh? What features are you talking about? I ask because if you go back and forth between MAX, Maya, and Lightwave, there's very little you don't get. Usually the big difference is in implementation, can't say I know anything about the 'excuses to use patents' bit.
As for 'claiming all kinds of features'... what exactly is your motivating thought behind that comment? The last 3 releases of Maya, 3D Studio MAX, and Lightwave (probably true for XSI as well, but I have not followed it) have all had impressive features that made the creation of quality 3D art easier to do. You claim that povray's renderer is 'second to none'. Well I honestly can't tell you where it stands as I haven't used it. I can tell you, though, that these days the big bottleneck is the artist, not the engine moving the pixels around. 'Features' are a big part of making sure an artist can express themselves. If the interface is getting in your way, then the renderer isn't doing you a lick of good.
I have NFI why anybody'd dismiss 'software for the pros' so easily.
"Derp de derp."
I hope you were just being sarcastic. If it got any more realistic no one would believe it was computer generated. In the low-res version, it looks like a photo from a digital camera. Only when you look at it in it's hi-res image can you see those "too perfect to be real" nuances. Personally, I rather like the effect it creates.
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.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
nVidia Gelato
Mental Ray taking advantage of OTS hardware
Dedicated raytracing hardware
Raytraced Quake 3
OpenRT realtime raytracing framework
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).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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...
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
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
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.
beer as in "free beer"
POV ray definately has its place. However, it really is not a replacement for 3dsmax and a real artist.
Someone who can't draw, use colors and compose will not be a good 3D artist regardless of the tools used. In the same way that a novice photographer can't (normally) compose artistically interesting photographs, a programmer won't be able to make an interesting raytrace without artistic skills even when the tools are perfectly photorealistic.
As far as commerical packages go, they have really nice tools for "massaging" forms like nurbs which are like 3d splines. Artists need to be able to make innumerable iterative adjustments to forms, colors and positions. You can't do that efficiently by only typing equations or adjusting numbers in property boxes.
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.)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Both Softimage (XSI) and Alias (Maya) report that rendering is faster on Linux (not 3X, but marginally at least).
The problem is that the interactive portions of the programs are often better in Windows, and sometimes (especially with XSI) include things that aren't possible with Linux (integration with IE, for one, and also often the use of VBS).
So you might think that we should just use Windows for interactive and Linux for rendering, but there were subtle differences in the rendered images - not better or worse, just subtle differences, that made compositing with images generated by both impossible (this is several years ago with Maya). Also, at the time, Linux multiprocessing was a bit more difficult. If we'd have had something like Irix's "runon" command, the animators would have been a lot happier. Moreover, many of our distributed rendering tools are happier running on a single platform.
Add to that the fact that a lot of other tools used - photoshop and other Adobe packages, as well as some other image manipulation programs (like ACDC), and we ultimately require Windows for interactive. Since we are a small shop, we also use those boxes for evening and weekend renders.
Still, rendering IS reported to be faster under Linux, and if you can live with the other tools available under Linux, it's probably a better, more cost-effective option than Windows.
Keep in mind that much of what you are seeing in film these days IS rendered with Linux, not just because it's cheaper (hey, multiply a 1000 boxes times the cost of Windows) but because it IS better.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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
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.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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...
it's interesting to see comments that pit povray against these other applications which are really intended to put a great amount of creative control at the hands of the user...
there are some fundamental differences between povray vs maya/max/etc which aren't so apparent but important to distinguish the applications.
pov models and renders objects based on the mathematical description of the surface. maya/max on the other hand models objects based on triangulating the surface. while it seems esoteric, it is a fundamental difference which really puts these applications into two different classes. try modeling a quaternion fractalor other mathematical shape/function in maya... additionally the complex and random model generation that pov has(onyale's pipe macro, chris colfax macros) is not something easily created with these other apps.
maya and max on the other hand have a strong UI to help put a layer between the user and the code itself. there's no way you could do the type of modeling in pov that you could in maya. pov is very methodical; plan out the image, heavy previsualization, utilization of macros and includes to manage the items you previously created. maya provides immediate feedback as items are created, providing a more fine art approach of creation, kinda like working with clay as opposed to architecting a building.
comparing these applications (pov/max/maya) is like comparing a car to a plane... they are both used for transportation, but the mechanisms to implement the main function is vastly different(it's not the best analogy, take it with a grain of salt)...
perhaps a more productive discussion would be to have some kind of shootout between maya, max, and blender.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Whoah!
Can you imagine pissing off the authors of an open source project so much that they specifically name you in their modified license?!?
This would be akin to a modified GPL version 4,
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Problem is when you are a professional, its not just about output quality, its about production quality.
If it takes longer to produce acceptable output then its NOT as 'good' in the general sence.
Raw productivity goes down in that situation, which costs money.
Amateurs dont count in the professional world, its just a fact of life. ( being an amateur 3D person myself, i can say that honestly )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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
Implemented in a video card in real time? Wow. I'm impressed.
Also, POV-Ray comes with documentation (fancy that!).
;) yafray docs
there is documentation, just not on the yafray pages
beer as in "free beer"
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.
You mean, if they'd just released version 20.5, you'd have been more impressed ? :-)
The developers concentrate on stability. Lots of other software comes and goes but POV is a stable application that you can start a render on, come back three days later, and not be looking at an 'access violation' messagebox. In fact version 3.5 was so heavily beta-tested that it was able to go two years without a single point release due to the absence of any significant 'crash the app' bugs.
Stability is essential when you want to run an app that may need to make several trillion calculations in a large render. Many POV-Ray users prefer stability over features, and those that don't use one of the unofficial versions :-)