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POV-Ray 10th Anniversary Contest
erich666 writes "You could win a great computer by making a cool image. POV-Ray is a free multiplatform ray-tracing renderer with source available. To celebrate POV-Ray's tenth anniversary some hobbyists are having a contest, and they convinced a few sponsors to donate some nice goodies. Me, I'm a no-talent slug, but still found their site's hall of fame worth visiting."
I NEED the great computer to win the make great work to win the contest.
Seriously, POV-Ray is a great piece of software, but if it's not changed since I last used it, then you need to be some kind of math/spacial-relationships/geometry god to create anything cool. Muchos Respect going to those who can do that stuff.
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
Also check out http://www.irtc.org/.
Internet Ray Tracing Competition
There are a couple of binary groups for povray on their own news server and some of the things that the people do there are really neat. They experiment with making povray do cloth effects and glowing. It's neat to see them develop these functions over time. Some of the early tries are kinda funny. Plus, there is a lot of cool stuff on the newsgroup that never makes it into the IRTC contest or POV-Ray hall of fame.
A red and white checkered ball next to a Roman arch with a background of stormclouds. It's going to kick arse.
I'm getting a bit sick, though, of having to use a conversion script every time I want to render something from Blender in POV-Ray (if even just to test the camera angles or lighting).
Any word on either the Blender or POV-Ray project getting a bit of compatibility between the two biggest open source 3D projects?
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Povray is a ray tracer.
Photoshop is a photo editor.
You might as well say MS Word is great but does it have the same text editing capabilities as Excel.
Apples and Oranges.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
POV RAY is not for the feint of heart, that's for sure. I don't know about most slashdotters, but I have a great challenge as it is, learning blender and YAFRAY to create and render 3D scenes.
Go To blender.org and download 2.34, you won't be disappointed. OK, I maybe you will be disappointed, but at least you'll have GUI to learn.
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
And the artists responsible for that hall of fame should be shot for being better than me.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
POV-Ray is not a program like Photoshop. POV-Ray could better be compared to a program like 3DS Max, or Lightwave, or any other 3D Modelling software. For a free equivalent to Photoshop, you should use GNU's "The GIMP" (GNU Image Manipulation Program).
:-D
To program a 1-minute full-motion 3D scene in POV-Ray? Well that depends on the complexity... how many primitives you are using, and such like. You will need to have a VERY clear idea in your head of what you want, before you even begin. POV-Ray is, as I said before, not terribly easy to use. It's EXTREMELY powerfull though. You just need to invest 15 lifetimes in learning how to use it.
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
Wings3D on thacs.rpms can export POV-Ray and other renderers as well.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
It would take somewhere between 1 minute and 1 week to render a 30 frame series for a scene. Depends on the calculations. normally if you don't have any speculars, and mirror reflection, you've cut your time considerably. photoshop and POVRAY is like comparing slashdot to michaelmoore.com
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
I'm waiting for the Eclipse plugin.
I had just used POV-Ray today, after many months. Just because I needed certain texture detail GIMP lightning effects could not do for me.
I use POV since 80386/DOS days...and while working my way through it today I concluded that nowadays I would never have gotten the resources (time/persistence) to learn it.
-><- no
1. Learn POVRAY = 68 Years
2. ENTER CONTEST and beat the other guy who knows POVRAY
3. PROFIT!!
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Wimps. Back in my day we used a horsehair brush and paints. Applied to a numbered board.
Not render a scene. Program a scene.
To program a 1-minute full-motion 3D scene in POV-Ray? Well that depends on the complexity... how many primitives you are using, and such like. You will need to have a VERY clear idea in your head of what you want, before you even begin.
:-)
When I first started animating with POV-Ray, I found a little program that would generate include files. Basically, you'd create your POV-Ray file and enter a set of variables into the coordinate spots. These variables would be in an include file that didn't exist yet.
Then, you'd plug those variables into this little program and tell it the minimum/maximum values and the number of frames you wanted. It would then generate a DOS batch file that would use "echo" statements to create the include file every frame. Worked pretty well (if you had the disk space).
These days POV-Ray just has variables that go from 0.0 to 1.0.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Another location too see amazing Pov-Ray images is http://www.irtc.org
Alot of the hall of fame images are actually winners of that ongoing competition
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
in the office picture?
:D
You are not allowed to smoke and,,,,,
talk into a microphone?
eat ice cones?
play darts?
apart from that it's damn fine work.
In the world of raytracing, I have never got past the place a cone and a metal sphere on a checkerboard myself.
Not render a scene. Program a scene.
Okay. Same answer. How long is a piece of string?
I can program a cube spinning on its axis that lasts for 1800 frames (1 minute at 30fps) in about 3 minutes. Want something more complex? It'll take more time.
The
POV-Ray is not 3D modelling software. It is a ray-tracer: a program that reads a scene description file and uses a ray-tracing algorithm to produce an image.
For 3D modelling software that works with POV-Ray, check out Moray or Wings3d. You can also use a program such as 3DS Max to model scenes for POV-Ray if you have appropriate software to convert the scene file to a format that POV-Ray understands.
Eh, I think you meant to ask if its got the same capabilities as Lightwave,3DStudioMax,etc.. I use Lightwave almost daily. About a year, or 18 months ago I tried out PovRay. Not nearly as user friendly, and took about 60% longer to render very similar scenes on the same PC. Granted its several thousand dollars less, so its great for hobby users, but its currently totally inadiquate for professional use.
the image of the train station with the jade tiger that was in the shareware catalogs back in the day advertising POV?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
One of the hall of fame pictures featured, The Wet Bird was the March-April 2001 IRTC Winner.
This is an amazing piece of artwork. One of the other artists (scroll to bottom) even mentions that "The Wet Bird" was accused of being a photograph when it was submitted.
Unbelievable stuff.
Is this the same mirrored-sphere-on-infinite-checkboard POV-Ray? The one where you have to describe all your objects and light sources in a big text file which then takes all day to render? How the hell did they get it to do those amazing things?
fish and pipes
There are some days I get so fed up w/ Word I edit my text in Excel... at least there I can force it to do what I want, rather than the program forcing me to do what it wants :)
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
Hey, I remember that.. You used to be able to get it to move alon a curve that had keypoints defined like:
curve(or whatever)(0,0,0,0,10,1,0,0,20,0,0,1);
If only i could remember the name of that app.
BTW : Props to the POVRAY Team.. Been tracing since my old 286 days, initially using Vivid and DKBTrace.. Love POV, still use it...
Who needs stinking GUI's????
Kids today...
Burma?
but its currently totally inadiquate for professional use.
While I agree with you in principle, you have to understand that POV-Ray has been around since before "realistic" professional 3D packages existed. POV-Ray blazed the trails that all other packages have followed. Sure, it's outdated and difficult now. But back in 1994, it was the most amazing thing ever.
Depsite it's age, however, POV-Ray still makes an inexpensive solution for doing up 2D game graphics, wallpapers, title screens, splash screens, and a lot of other types of graphics.
(BTW, are they sure it's only been 10 years? I could swear that POV-Ray has been around for 11 or 12.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You can make complex scenes with Povray in 256 characters or less
if you ask me
Its predecessor, DKBTrace, was around for a bit before POV was born.
No, Povray has not been around since before 'realistic' professional 3d packages existed. It has not blazed trails. Renderman is much older and as always been about fifty steps ahead in development. Do you think Povray had the same capabilities as Renderman in '95? Hell no. There were maybe three renderers that could have done what Renderman did then (Renderman, maybe Mental Ray, and Prisms... obscure). Povray is great, but let's not start the revisionist history so soon.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
What kind of t-shirt?
"Never mind the fact that it has about a fifth the features, half the speed, and mediocre output... IT'S GPL!"
Moron.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Use POV to render your lego creations. Check out www.ldraw.org
More amazing than the images from the contest are the fact that people have been using this program for 10 years making such beautiful images and the documentation is like 50% complete.
It does look a lot like CSS or perhaps SVG would be more accurate.
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Its predecessor, DKBTrace, was around for a bit before POV was born.
:-(
Ah, that's right. I'd forgotten all about that. Of course, POV-Ray was born on Compuserve, away from my prying eyes.
No, Povray has not been around since before 'realistic' professional 3d packages existed. It has not blazed trails. Renderman is much older and as always been about fifty steps ahead in development.
Now hold on a moment here. I remember '94 fairly well, and I'm pretty sure that Renderman was NOT creating ray traced images. In fact, all the packages I remember from the time did more or less simple poly-fill stuff. Renderman was so cool because it made neat animations (like the jumping desk lamp) really easy to do. (Not that you could get ahold of a copy of Renderman without selling your soul.)
Now maybe I'm wrong on this, but I don't remember any true "photo-realistic" competition (besides a few other shareware ray tracers that I can't remember) until Lightwave came along and made 3DSMax get their asses in gear.
While we're on the subject, do you remember who the big ray tracing guru was back then? If I recall correctly, he was some guy with long red hair, and had a first name that was something like "Dan". I'd look it up, but at the moment I'm about 250 miles from my old ray tracing book.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I did a one minute video for school (not posting the link, sorry), 30fps, with 3-6 frame oversampling for some motion blur, and it took like 3 days on between modern 4-7 PCs.
It was using radiosity, and there was about 70,000 objects in the scene.
So, along freaking time basically. But the results are great, as good as many commercial apps. So it does have "professional power", IMHO. But it's a renderer and script editor, not a modeller - so it's not Maya or Max if that's what you're getting at.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
I was using this in 1993 or earlier. Not quite sure where the person that submitted this got the 10th anniversary bit. I don't see anything like that on the web page.
Z.
Me, I'm a no-talent slug
Damn! I was going to do a slug. You took my creative idea. Somebody already beat me to a slashdotted sky-server also. Great job they did on that fiber-optic cable coming out of the front.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, it takes a while to learn the syntax, as in any other language... but with a little geometry notion you can do very nice things.
Here are a few of my POV experiments:
Cut glass
Dice
Three balls
Just a guess, but maybe you ought to learn about tab stops. :)
I tutor computer courses at the local community college, and I've found that tab stops are Word's primary tool for horizontal positioning.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Small hint. Look at the world like an artist.
:Drawing on the right side of the brain, and it's sequal.
Get the book
"Oy! That wasn't a troll! It's a serious question! Those images are awesome, and I'd seriously like to know how they came out of POV-Ray, which I had been assuming was totally obsolete."
Do you assume that DNA is obsolete? POV-Ray is procedural based. So's DNA.
I remember buying a povray book at the bookstore, which came with a version of povray on CD, when I was in high school, and I graduated in '94. I suppose it's remotely possible I'm not remembering clearly, or that I got the book just before I graduated and what was on the CD was the first release or something.... Still, I would have guessed at least 12 years, if not much longer. I seem to remember povray having origins in compuserve back before I was using it (I had no compuserve at the time, just FidoNet).
11*43+456^2
I'm quite certain I was using POV-Ray in 1992, perhaps even 1991, and it wasn't new then. 10th anniversary was awhile ago guys...
RenderMan itself is an implementation of the Reyes renderer ("Renders Everything You See"). First and foremost, it's a zBuffer rendering engine.
It had lots of really cool features - the ability to render tons of geometry without having to have the entire scene in memory, a very powerful shading language, the brilliant folks at Pixar pushing it to the limits...
Anyone remember "The Road to Point Reyes"? (A link to it would be appreciated; I can't seem to Google it).
These days, it's even got a raytracer built into it. (A moment of silence for ExLuna and BMRT, please).
It also helps to have folk like John Lassiter running the place, who's well grounded in "classical" animation.
Back in '97, when I was waiting for escrow to close on a house, I used POV-ray to model one of the rooms as a home theater. It was the best tool at the time to visualize whether the new furniture and projection screen would fit in the room. It was my best POV-ray programming effort to date! I found the pov scene file the other day and was able to relive some memories.... it was just a little dissapointing that the scene I used to wait and hour for took less than a minute to render today.
I'm one of the 2 original developers of POV-Ray. Originally, it was called DKBTrace. I actually coined the name "POV" for it, and did the initial port to IBM-PC from Amiga, as well as wrote the orginal display preview routines and many of the internal textures.
When I co-developed POV-Ray, I did it on a 20 Mhz 286, with a '287, That right, a 286!! It had about 8 MB of extended memory. It ran 4 60 GB Full-height 5-1/4" MFM Hard Drives - 2 with an old XT controller and the main 2 with the standard AT controller. The VGA card had just been introduced and we needed more colorful apps badly!
A simple test trace of a sphere and checkerboard would take 2-4 hours. A moderately complex scene would take 2-3 DAYS at 640x480 and AA on.
POV-Ray was developed between the two of us over the period of about 3 years, transferring files via MODEM at 2400 baud back and forth. A friend set us up a Raytracing BBS to distribute it, called "You Can Call Me RAY". Eventually, Compuserve gave us a complimentary development area to use there (and that was back when they were charging $$$ by the MINUTE, that was nice of them!).
After 5 yars of intense development, the original author and I burned out and let the current group continue to develop and distribute the program. All this was several years before "The Internet" became a thing. It is really gratifiying to see what some of the true artists have done with "my baby".
Thanks for the info! That's really interesting stuff! Could you answer one question for me, though? There's some argument over whether POV originally stood for "Persistence of Vision" or "Point of View". (I was always partial to the former, myself.) Did POV actually stand for the later and get morphed into the former, or are all these "Point of View" people just making this stuff up?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
As you might be aware, pov-ray can be used to make pr0n. Since us geeks only get to see pictures of pretty girls but never touch them, why not take the next logical step and look at pictures of pretty girls that don't even exist?
And even better, if the source for the picture is available, you can even modify the picture so she looks like you want her to. Geek heaven! Finally a girl we can all understand!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This Blender User Interface Tutorial demonstrates the basics of the interface, even explaining how to create the 4-pane view you speak of. There are a slew of other tutorials on that same site as well.
It's great because it's a nice renderer.
It sucks because they are so paranoid about having their precious user interface hidden (which user interface pretty much sucks) that it's against the license to integrate it in a seamless fashion into anything else.
Yes, I know they're pissed about that magazine in the UK including some of it on a CD, but still.
Does a t-shirt have the same capabilities as a leprechaun?
Yes
Once you get used to the language, it's not that hard to make good looking, complicated stuff. Povray has dozens of built in geometric primitives, CSG support (you can subtract objects from each other), loops, and macros (which can be invoked recursively to generate things like trees). Some things are easier to make in a gui modeller, but many things are actually easier to code directly.
Here's something I've been working on. It's all code except for one of the textures and the Jolly Roger on the boat.
-jim
You never mentioned anything about raytracing in your original post. No, Renderman did not have any raytracing abilites at the time, but it did not need nor want them. Raytracing would take *WAY* too fucking long to be feasible on the hardware they had. Renderman was designed from the ground up to be a fast production level renderer, and as such is was a scanline renderer since those are significantly faster in most every application.
Even if you choose to discount Renderman on the basis of lack of raytracing, Mental Ray had raytracing from its inception in the mid-late 80's.
I'm not taking away from what Povray is, but you're overstating its place. Most, probably all, of the features were implemented in other packages beforehand. Povray IS, as the original poster stated, totally inadequate for pro-level use. It is too slow and an absolute pain in the ass to get information into. This doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's not usable in a production enviroment.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Not recommended - didn't you ever see weird science!
The point of PoV-Ray being inadequate for professional use is moot. It is already being used for professional use (and has been for at least a few years). You only need to use Google to find a few artists who use PoV-Ray professionaly. Many artists use commercial packages for modelling, and use PoV-Ray to render the scene. PoV-Ray is a renderer, so it makes perfect sense to use it as one, even if the scenes were built using other tools.
I've used moray dos version since 3.0 days. It's useful on Dos but the windows version is more useful for most. looking at the current download site all windows versions are shareware only and must be registered for any useful work.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I used PollyRay many years ago, its much like POV-Ray but allowed you to do animations. One animation took my 386 (MS-DOS) 4 days to render - needless to say, I was suffering from withdrawal symptoms cause I could not use my PC in the meantime. You youngsters think you are so cool with your multi-tasking OSs - you don't know your born !!
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
Idiot Mods. This is fact is EXACTLY ON TOPIC!!
DKBTrace was the forerunner to POV-Ray. It was originally programmed on an Amiga and ported to the IBM-PC second. After it became POV-Ray, the Amiga was the first back-port. Give the man (?) a cigar, he's right. Also, one of the first file import conversion utilities written for it was for Sculpt-3D. Right Again!
How the fuck can a 1st post EVER be REDUNDANT by
IT'S VERY DEFINITION?!?!?!?!? Especially an on-topic one (Verrrry Rare!). It's amazing though, there's almost no troll activity in this entire thread. I guess they missed one for a change.
The parent post does make some sense, though I'd agree it's a flamebait in such a terse form without elaboration.
From Open Source point of view, POV-Ray is problematic. Technically it is not Open Source; for example, commercial distribution is not allowed. One of the most misunderstood and most important strengths of OSS is the ability to use in any kind of settings, including commercial, military, etc. For example Apache would never have become popular if its license forbade using it for commercial purposes.
Also your right to modify it and distribute your modifications (this includes using parts of it in a new open source program) are severely limited.
Not allowing modification and commercial redistribution are slightly more than technical variations on the GPL. they make it something more akin to closed source Windows Free(as-in-beer)ware.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well, as others pointed out, Photoshop isn't quite the same thing. What you're looking for is a comparison to other big commercial rendering tools.
What I can say is that PoV-Ray is definitely just as good as any pro renderer. I think the only bad thing about it is that the scene description language is their own doing, definitely not compatible with anything else - you need a modeller (or converter) that specifically supports PoV-Ray. There's no modeller with the package either, so you need to stick with something that you know and has exporter or direct support for PoV-Ray. That said, the language is extremely versatile too, you can do very impressive things if you tweak the code before feeding it to PoV-Ray. And with complex enough scenes, the output is definitely comparable to commercial pro renderers - just take a look at the hall of fame pictures linked in the article.
This seems as good a place as any to plug my gds2pov program.
It takes a gds2 file (integrated circuit layout information) as an input and outputs a POV-Ray scene file with the circuit in 3D.
Of limited interest I realise (how many people design chips?), but there you go.
For downloads (Solaris, Linux, Window) and some pretty pictures go to http://www.atchoo.org/gds2pov/
Cheers,
RogerDo you have any better hostages?
Depsite it's age
"its".
I agree. My choice of words could have been better (and I do consider POV-Ray utterly non-free).
:)
I think I added the qualification "technically" because I thought it might make some people think twice before replying "its source is available, so it's open source, never mind the commonly accepted definition". Now that I think about it, it probably doesn't even serve that purpose very well
Some of the renderings in the Hall of fame are fantastic.
But sadly, it seems that no POV-ray artist has succeeded in creating a proper human form.
When they try, they have that creepy not-quite-right look that was common in professional computer graphics a few years ago.
I attribute this to the lack of powerful graphic modelling programs used in the pov toolchain. To make realistic human shapes, one needs to be able to quickly and easily nudge these forms thousands of times before its right.
- end-user license
- distribution license
- source license
That said everyone is of course free not to use POV-Ray for whatever reason...Anyone remember Vivid Raytracer? What ever happened to those guys?
I was using povray in 1991 so I know it's at least 13 years old. The anniversary is for the povray.org domain registration.
Is it possible to use a kind of "blurred" anti-aliasing to simulate film grain in rendered sequences? At a place I used to work in that did 3D graphics, I used to bang a bit of "film-look" noise on and tweak the colour ranges a bit which seemed (to me) to do two things - it gave the DV codec a bit more of a chance on flattish surfaces, and it made the whole thing look more "believable" when you showed it on a TV.
Beware, folks, that POV-Rays is not open-source. And it seems it won't be ,despite the promises of the developers to rewrite it from scratch.
Maybe sometime someone else should start a true, open source raytracer to surpass POV-Ray in the mid-term future...
I'm amused by the 1st-place entry being a sphere. A nicely lit sphere, but still a sphere. Not only that, but it apparently got third place too?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
OK. Here's one I did ( Windows Survivor ) that might be popular with this crowd
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I had a bit of free time in Sep. 2000, so I spent an entire day tweaking the following dumb animation of a spaceship flying around. Invader, try 5. I had hardly any POVRay skill, the animation was created without any modeling tools at all, and the stupid thing took all day to render on the 400MHz K6-2 I had at the time. And the source file got deleted in an unrelated accident later on. If I didn't have a Real Job, I'd probably spend a lot of time working on POVRay junk. As it is, I just look at the real artists in the POVRay Hall of Fame and think, "Wow. Nifty!"
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
It's Persistence of Vision. It was named in homage to my favorite Salvador Dali painting, "The Persistence of Memory", the one with the melting clocks.
I understand about authorial (developorial?) intentionality and all that. I think the allusion is great. It also has an unintentional affinity. Persistence of vision is the the name of the effect that blends the separate frames of a motion picture together. Persistence of vision enables/tricks our brains into seeing projected films as continuous motion.
blog
Wow, does this ever bring back memories. Big props out to you and the other coders. I had no idea that the name Persistence of Vision had been lost over time. I always loved that name.
We used to play a lot with DKBTrace, Vivid, etc. on our rockin' 286s. Along with Fractint for those funky fractals. Actually, I think I started with Fractint and DKB on an XT...
I remember dialing into You Can Call Me RAY too!
I still have POV installed on my machine but haven't actually used it for a while. I used it for a website about 7 years ago where I mapped the company's logo colours onto spheres that I turned into rotating buttons. I then processed the animation frames using Photoshop's brand-new batch commands. They finally stopped using those buttons last year sometime. Found a copy on the wayback machine though: http://web.archive.org/web/19990218075344/www.andr ewsgreene.bc.ca/home.html
-- Not much to look at now, but at the time it was pretty cool. ;)
Geez, now I'm going to have to take a break from Doom III and do some ray tracing...
Ahh, the memories of BMRT. You know, I actually have that program to thank for getting me involved in Linux in the first place.
OT, I know, but I had to reminisce.
Ahh I remember fondly the halcyon days of POVRay on the Atari ST, leaving it to render an elaborate scene for a day only to realise after it had finished that a light source was facing the wrong way and that consequently practically 75% of the scene was in complete darkness.
:)
Shame there isn't any AI built in which somehow flags this.. "hold on, this is like the millionth pixel that I've rendered which is #222222"
RAY-TRACERS:
YASRT Yet Another Simple Ray Tracer
Raja Ray-tracer in Java
Radiance raytracer free for non-commecial use
MODELERS:
YAPRM Yet Another Pov-Ray Modeler
OTHERS:
LeoCAD Not a ray-tracer but can plug-in to many ray tracers. It allows you to take virtual LEGO bricks and make things out of them. Neat!
LDraw Another LEGO modeler
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Been like ten minutes and I still haven't got the email for the password to log in here, so I will just post Anonymous..
In any case, I looked around for some statistics, just to get an idea how POV-Ray 'may' compare, since there is a lot of mumbling about speed (from people that used it on ancient machines). Unfortunately I can't find decent specs on newer movies like The Lord of the Rings, but I did finds these for the relatively old Toy Story movies:
Toy Story -
800,000 hours to render.
3.5 minutes of video per day (maximum).
Render times per image = 45 minutes to 20 hours.
Used 110 Sun workstations with 300 CPUs to manage it.
Toy Story 2 -
Most of the statistics where missing, but the times where 10 minutes to 3 days per frame.
Even if you assumed that newer movies and methods produce them in 1/2 that time, most of these movies use a lot of cheats to produce things that POV-Ray does internally and almost always use *huge* meshes of triangles. They still don't beat POV-Ray in speed, except in very specific cases, many use scripting behind the scenes, so that they can more accurately control characters and its only the front ends and special programs like the MASS system they developed for LOR armies that make them better. Guess what though.. That is basically a engine that drives there renderer, not part of the actually graphics system. Change the output so it generates POV-Ray code instead of Maya or whatever and you get the same result.
The only real difference between POV-Ray and other systems is that no one has glued a limited and often limiting GUI to it as the default way to use it, then glued an insane price tag over top of that. Gee, I am impressed. I guess I will run out and buy one of them right this minute. lol
Seriously, there are GUIs, converters etc. that can be used to do stuff like the others do. The problem? No one takes POV-Ray seriously, because it doesn't have a huge price tag, so there is no cross intergration between the tools needed to do anything. Where one of the high priced ones can just import an object from some other high priced product, you often have to export 'part' of something to a second program, then export that to POV-Ray, only to then go back and rebuilt stuff lost on the conversion. This isn't POV-Ray's fault, but the lack of support from the companies making all the other products.
Well, maybe some of it is also marketing. After all, why provide a free export function, when you can charge someone else for the privilage of using a proprietary import plugin?
But one thing is certain. People that produce movies either tweak scripts or build applications to do it for them. The fact that the GUIs hide what is really going on behind the scenes, for the dumber users, doesn't change that basic fact. Almost all packages have a readable modelling language output and/or script of some sort, but only the 'been there, done that' stuff is done purely in the GUI.
Not only it is a great raytracer in itself, it is also a very powerful learning tool: learning complex geometry and programming was never so fun. It's an interactive process by which some truly wonderful artwork may result.
Kudos to the POV-Ray team and all the great artists/hackers who roam around IRTC.
Perhaps getting a free software license could bolster POV-Ray usage a little more, specially if it could be package along with something like KPOVmodeller from the open-source KDE project.
Of course, the real fun is to make worlds born and carefully crafted from your very fingers through a simple text editor. Reminds me of P&P RPGs where you only need your imagination to go wild.
I don't feel like it...