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."

Comments

Where's the cross-project support?

[oostevo]

Don't get me wrong, POV-Ray is a wonderful renderer.

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?

Re:Where's the cross-project support?

[david.given]

you should take a look again at Blender.

I want to like Blender. I really do. Every so often I have another look, try and make it do what I want, and give up.

The user interface is fine, I can cope with that. The problem I have is it's so weird and inconsistent under the hood. Admittedly, most of these problems stem from using the scanline renderer; I haven't investigated Yafray.

For example:

I want to make a planet. Fine, I create a sphere for the planet and a omni light source for the sun. That works.

Now I want an atmosphere. I create another sphere, a bit bigger than the planet. Doesn't work. Do some investigation... Blender doesn't do volumetric effects. Damn.

I look into halos. Eventually I manage to get something in roughly the right place, although it looks crap. It's also being lit by the sun even when it's behind the planet.

After more investigation, eventually I find out that I have to turn on shadows on the planet and the atmosphere; and shadows only work if you're using spotlight lamps! This strikes me as incredibly broken.

So I switch to a spotlight lamp. Now most of the features of my planet are there, although it looks really awful. One of the problems is that the lamp is too close to the planet, so that the light isn't parallel. I move the lamp away... and everything goes black.

More investigation reveals that spotlight lamps seem to stop illuminating anything more than 40 units away. Just dead. At one stage I had half the planet illuminated and the other half in complete blackness.

It was at this point that I gave up. In Povray, however, I was happily rendering entire solar systems to scale, so that my planet was 12000 units in diameter, the sun was 150000000 units away, my camera was 0.002 units above the planetary surface, and it worked perfectly. Plus, I had a whole bunch of programmatic macros to map a latitude and longitude on my planet onto my universal coordinate space for any given date and time, which was cool.

Another thing I hate about Blender is its insistence on using meshes for everything. Meshes are grainy, eat memory, and look naff if you zoom in too far (like on my planet). Oh, it does have basic CSG support, but what happens if I create a complex model and then decide that I want to move one of my primitives a little to the left? I can't, that's what. Once you've applied the CSG operation that's it; if you want to change something, you have to start from scratch. Povray's script-based system means that you just change one coordinate and rerender.

There is stuff I like in Blender; the texture system is really nice, and I wish I could find a way of exporting a Blender texture and using it in Povray. Being able to just point at things instead of searching through your script is useful, and being able to position stuff visually rather than typing in coordinates is wonderful. The inverse kinematics would be cool, too, if I could ever make it work.

Plus, at my level of skill, Povray looks so much better than Blender. I never managed to make Blender's scanline renderer produce anything halfway decent. But Povray, with its mathematically perfect shapes, looks wonderful every time. I can focus on the scene content, and not have to keep adding hacks to improve the image quality.

What a coincidence!

[Pope Raymond Lama]

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.

Re:For one frame, cool

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:That's backwards

[ConceptJunkie]

Meh. GUI's are for wimps. I made this without a GUI. I did use a couple of home-grown C++ programs to generate the tree and drapes, but this was done all by writing scripts. Really, it's not that bad for a lot of things.

Of course, there are no 3D articulated people or detailed sports cars in it or anything.

Rick

p.s. Look closely and you'll notice the room isn't furnished.

Re:That's backwards

[Solder Fumes]

Well, editing a text file is indeed lightweight. But rendering is a different story...and if you have a slow computer, you can't render as many times to tweak everything just right.

For example, this takes quite a while to render on a 1.2GHz machine, even though those are just speckle shells and not individual hairs. This wasn't too bad, I think 10 hours on a 233MHz laptop. Likewise with this one. But this one took a couple days on a 1.2GHz machine due to all the internal reflections and focal blurring. Also, this Megatokyo fanart took a day or so to render. Nothing really complex as far as the actual objects go, just a lot of light and atmospherics.

I also kind of like it for roughing out mechanical parts, though of course it's no AutoCAD. This was part of something I was trying to put together with rollerblade wheels. And here was the furniture set I modeled while planning out a dorm layout one year in college.

None of this stuff involved modelers at all, just typed in, using macros and recursion where possible. You start with a simple sphere statement, and then it gets addictive.

Re:For one frame, cool

[rat7307]

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...

Re:For one frame, cool

[AKAImBatman]

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.)

Povray examples in 256 characters

[gtoomey]

You can make complex scenes with Povray in 256 characters or less

Forget the contest - Do LEGO in POV

[Graemee]

Use POV to render your lego creations. Check out www.ldraw.org

Depends, but a long time

[boomgopher]

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.

Re:That's backwards

[Short Circuit]

I never really messed with POV-Ray, but I do know you can change your rendering resolution, to render faster. That won't capture all the detail, though.

Perhaps you can render only specific regions of an image at its final resolution?

It isn't *that* hard to use POVRay

[fejikso]

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

Re:1,2,3

[Tablizer]

Learn POVRAY = 68 Years

I once played with POVRAY for a few weeks between contracts during the depth of the dot-com slump, and had a great time. However, you are right that to know most of it probably takes many years (unless you are a rare super-wiz).

However, one "trick" is to find an interesting idea, not so much finding the ultimate effect or ultimate tweak. For example, use combinations of a few simple shapes and ideas to construct an otherwise complex or interesting object. You can make up for your lack of technical ability with creativity, and visa versa with the tool.

If you are a tech whiz or very patient, then you can win by recreating a photograph by defining minuute details. It is just a matter of coordinates. But a stunning view of simple things from an artistic angle can also win the prize. Find a concept in POV that interests you and play with the one concept for a while. You might find an interesting idea or scene sooner than you think. Some people build a forest, others search a forest.

Re:That's backwards

[Solder Fumes]

Yes, in the Windows GUI you can start a render at your final settings and then stop it. Then you can click on the image and select a rectangle which can then be rendered by itself. However on files like the Seraphim one, even a little 50x100 sliver can take several minutes. I usually use very small sizes to check how atmospherics and reflections look overall at the final quality settings, I use low-detail rendering at full or half-size to place objects, and I render selected areas at full resolution to check on things like texture and atmospheric graininess.

Re:POV is great and sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's a text based interface, any program could call POV-Ray and pass a scene to it, to be rendered. Quite like the UNIX way I'd say....

gds2pov

[oojah]

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,

Roger

A 10-second silly POVRay animation.

[CJ Hooknose]

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!"