POV-Ray 10th Anniversary Contest 216
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'm confused (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where's the cross-project support? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure if they're going to be pointing it anymore toward POV-Ray as they seem to be heading down the Yafray path. But since anyone could write a plug-in for it, I don't see it being impossible for POV-Ray to be better intergrated.
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell if I know.
I swear to god, either I'm getting old, these people are absolutely brilliant, or it's time to turn in my Geek Membership card.
Kudos to all the talent.
Re:what's that sign? (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
only 10 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:only 10 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:POV-Ray is for the Hardcore! (Score:3, Insightful)
The scripting language is really not all that bad (especially compared to VRML, the other graphics scripting language I've used). You can build complex objects by generating them within loops or recursive macro calls - you can make a halfway decent looking tree in less than a page of code. If you're used to pointing and clicking, it can be a pain, but some things that would be near impossible to create in gui modeller are easy to program.
CSG helps the user friendliness quite a bit. With ray tracers, it's algorithmically trivial to subtract one object from another, so they expose those capabilities to the user.
Here's something I did [ogi.edu]. Except for the jolly roger (which you can't really see anyways) and one of the textures, it's all code, even the lumpy rocks.
-jim
Re:POV-Ray is for the Hardcore! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That's backwards (Score:1, Insightful)
I think a number of the HoF entries are there for technical skill required more than aesthetic happiness.
Mostly what I've seen from games is really nice textures thrown on dull scene geometry. Sure, the characters get a lot of triangles, but the rest of the world is usually bland. And the textures look photorealistic because they *are* photos.
Re:Where's the cross-project support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Try this in blender:
That should look close to a povray sphere primitive. Also, if you texture the planet, you can add a deform to that (high point due to subdivision) mesh you just created are really get a lot of bang out of your sphere.
Blender can't do volumetric stuff just yet. Tough, with as far as it's come since 2.3, it won't be long. The open-source Blender is way better than the closed source one, and getting better at a faster rate than POV. Then again, I think POV is perfect, so you can't improve on that very easily!