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.
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.
How I discovered POV-Ray

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.
My Experience 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.
Different versions
