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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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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
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.
You can make complex scenes with Povray in 256 characters or less
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.
Ok, I found the book, it was a Waite Group Press book called "Ray Tracing Creations", copyright is 1993, and it did include povray on CD. I also just hit povray.org to see if they said something about the date they're claiming is the 10th anniversary - it's the povray.org *website*'s 10th anniversary, not the 10th anniversary of povray itself. Fix the damn article
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".
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