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POV-Ray 10th Anniversary Contest

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the pretty-pictures dept.

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."

3 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Where's the cross-project support? by oostevo · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?

    --
    In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
    Oh wait...
  2. Re:That's backwards by Solder+Fumes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Povray examples in 256 characters by gtoomey · · Score: 5, Interesting

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