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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.
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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.
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Wings3D on thacs.rpms can export POV-Ray and other renderers as well.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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.
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..
That's the pov-ray logo.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
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.
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
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
At first I thought it was a rendering of the office from Glengarry Glen Ross, but then I saw the printer.
If you made the room longer, re-arranged the furniture, put some shelving under the windows and a coffee maker in the back it would be just about perfect, though...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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".
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.
Hehe... Well, I guess this is a Slashdot exclusive; it's been a long asked and wondered about question. 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. There, now you have it, the real story.
It was later pointed out to me that it was a nice double entendre for "Point of View" as well. We were worried maybe the TV show "POV" might get mad (well, not really). Actually, there was another copyrighted program called POV. I can't remember exactly was it was for, but it wasn't rendering or visualization, but that's why we called it "POV-Ray" instead of just "POV".
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
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.
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?
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.