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POV-Ray Page
Jul 10 2002
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 POV-Ray is an excellent ray-tracer and it is completely free. All the images in my 3d images and animations are made with POV-Ray. POV-Ray can be used to make very photo-realistic images as well as abstract, surrealistic or toony images or whatever you like.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from here: http://www.povray.org
This page describes how I discovered POV-Ray, what I think of it now, and is also meant to encourage other people to begin using POV-Ray.
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In the beginning of 1998 I found POV-Ray 3.01 on a cheap CD I bought with different freeware and shareware 3D graphic tools (3D Designers Toolkit by CD Factory). When I first saw it I quickly rejected it because it seemed very complicated to me. I had absolutely no prior programming or scripting experience, so it was pretty intimidating. Just a lot of text - and when I pressed a button an image suddenly appeared out of nowhere ???
A month later I gave it another try though. I read the tutorials in the manual and slowly I began to understand how it worked. I remember being puzzled at complicated nested CSG. Sure I understood a difference{} of two primitives, but how did it work when a difference{} contained another difference{}? Later the glorious moment happened when the logic way of POV-Ray script (and any scripting and programming language for that matter) struck me: When handling a nested CSG object, I didn't need to simultaneously keep track of the CSG operations on all levels. I only needed to keep track of the resulting shapes from the lower levels, regardless of how these shapes were created. This "one thing at a time" way of thinking - where you can work with functions that use other functions without having to remember the details of those other functions - seemed to apply to everything in scripting and programming.
The funny thing is - after my brain was wrapped around this basic way of programmic thinking, it went very smooth from there and I coded more and more complicated scenes. For several years it was the only scripting language I knew, and I can't imagine any more cool introduction to programming.
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I like POV-Ray very much. It is the first 3D program I have ever worked with. Now, I have acces to a proffesional 3D package too, but I never use it. I prefer to write my scenes in POV-Ray code rather than making them with a graphical-interfaced polygon-based modeler. Also, I think the quality of the final output is better with POV-Ray.
There are certain things POV-Ray is not very good at. You can't easily model realistic organic things such as people or animals. This is simply next to impossible with a text-based interface. But you can make such models in external modelers and import them into POV-Ray. This is one thing that I don't have experience with at all, but other people have done it with great success.
What I'm most into is the programming aspect of POV-Ray. I like programming various simulations that result in impressive animations. But besides being a programmer, I also consider myself an artist, so I try to also make my works have an artistic appeal when possible.
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In the beginning I used to sometimes use the official POV-Ray 3.1 and sometimes the unofficial version called MegaPov. MegaPov has a lot of very usefull features which I use in some of my scenes. Later the official POV-Ray 3.5 was released, and it had all the best features from the old MegaPov included (though rewritten from scratch to ensure high quality code). There has also been made a new MegaPOV 1.0 based on POV-Ray 3.5 which I use now and then. Now POV-Ray 3.6 has been released with no new features but with better stability and a few bugfixes. Eventually there will be an official POV-Ray 4.0, but that will take quite a while (think many years), as it will be completely rewritten.
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To work with POV-Ray is exciting. But it gets much more exciting when you can share you interest for POV-Ray with other POV-Ray users. That is why the POV-Ray newsgroups exist. There's more than 25 newsgroups and the most popular of them are rather big. The people using the newsgroups are very kind. When you post a message you can be almost sure to get a reply. It's the place where people ask questions, answer questions, share ideas, discuss tecniques, show their work, tell jokes, and much more. You can get to the groups either by your newsgroup client or by web-view through this address: news.povray.org.
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Now and then I'm working on new stuff: Animations, images, computer games, and other things.
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Write a comment about POV-Ray Page:
(Your comment will be shown below.)
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Jul 26 2006 from Marti Mendenhall
Hi - I am new to povray. Can you recommend any tutorials? I'm just an old html kinda girl.
Thanks!
May 25 2006 from Cicero Moraes [website]
(with no erros)
I'm your fan! You are a very good artist and I have to congratulation and thank you for the codes and tutos that you give in your site.
The POV-Ray is now my default renderer. I ever wanto t work with it. You with your site material help me to undertand and discover many things about POV. Sory for my bad English :)
Cheers
May 25 2006 from Cicero Moraes [website]
Hi!
I'm your fan! You are a very good artist and I have to congratulation and thank for the codes and tutos that you give in your site.
The POV-Ray is now my default renderer. I ever wanto to wotk with it. You with your site material help me to undertand and discover many things about POV.
Cheers
May 14 2006 from Larry Cox
I am very interested in getting into producing 3D graphics for printing on lets say a t-shirt. Do you think POV-RAY would be something to persue for this type of thing?
Apr 25 2005 from bernard siao [website]
your site is marvelous.... all the 3d graphics are so amazing..... you must be proud of your works men..... the images are so electifying.... keep it up....
Feb 16 2005 from Steve Hedemann
I think that I first became aware of POVRay whin I still had my Commadore C64. Like you It seemed too complicated and all I knew was BASIC. Since then I have learned and worked with many languages. I love programming and learning new ones. POVRay is a fun way to program and express myself. I am very new at it and have not yet created anything great. Thank you for your web site. It really inspires me.
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POV-Ray Page
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