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Graphics Software

POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the remember-the-goold-old-days dept.
Marty writes "The very long awaited version 3.5 of POV-Ray is available. POV is the pre-eminent open source ray tracer. The new version has many wonderful improvements and is able to allow amateurs and pros alike to generate CG images to drool over." I spent many hours mucking about with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so my guess is those render times don't suck as bad.
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POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered More

POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered

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  • Good fun (Score:4, Interesting)

    by atcurtis ( 191512 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:43AM (#3857684) Homepage Journal
    I remember having great fun with POV years ago... It was also very good to poke around at to learn how a ray-tracer works. I'd also recommend the book "Tricks of the Graphics Gurus" for those who don't have it.

    • Text of article... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      POV-Ray v3.5 is Now Available

      It is with pleasure that the POV-Team announces that POV-Ray version 3.5 is now officially available for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.

      In development for well over two years, v3.5 is a major improvement over all previous versions, not only in features, but in stability and the quality of the documentation and included example files. Of course, we don't claim it to be bug free (in fact, here's our known bugs list), but given our extensive alpha, pre-beta and beta program we feel that what we are releasing today is a stable, well-tested piece of software that can be used with confidence.

      Since our first internal alpha version (early 2001), we have built 6 alphas, 14 private pre-betas, 16 public betas, and 6 release candidates to get us to today's final 3.5 release. During this time we read, reviewed, and in many cases answered over 12,000 newsgroup postings in our private and public beta test forums, resulting in many hundreds of bug fixes and improvements.

      The POV-Team would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to all those who helped to make this possible, and particularly to our dedicated group of pre-beta testers, who not only performed testing functions but also made major contributions to the scene and documentation files, not only during the pre-beta stage but right up to the days before the final release.

      The POV-Team co-ordinator, Chris Cason, would also like to extend his personal thanks to the POV-Team members who worked long and hard on this since we started on it all those years ago. Your dedication is truly appreciated.

      [July 09, 2002]
      • That seems to have posted everything I didn't care about and left out the main point: So what is new in Povray 3.5?
        • So what is new in Povray 3.5?
          Quoting the headlines from the New Features [povray.org] page:
          • Noise Changes
          • Photons, Dispersion and Improved Radiosity
          • New Light Source Types and Light Groups
          • Isosurface and Parametric Objects
          • Sphere Sweep Object
          • New More Compact Mesh Object & Solid Mesh
          • UV Mapping
          • Improved Textures
          • Improved and Faster Media
          • New Patterns
          • New Functions
          • Additional New Features
            • Reading of JPEG and TIFF image formats
            • Projected through
            • More realistic attenuation
            • New clock keywords
            • New image size keywords
            • Inverse transform
            • Spherical camera
            • New float function: inside
            • Splines
            • Metallic reflection
            • Mapping using warps
            • Double illuminate flag
            • No image and no reflection flags
            • Basic Unicode Support
            • Declare a float constant from an INI file
          • Bug Fixes and Enhancements
            • Light source enhancements
            • Fixed normal average, reflection and other related problems
            • Fixed cylinder camera problems
            • Fixed the use of multiple closed bezier-splines in prism
            • Fixed infinite cone bug
            • Fixed the use of two subsequent colors, not separated by a comma in checker, hexagon and bricks.
            • Fixed gamma correct bugs
            • Numerous other bug fixes and optimizations
          If you want to know more, you have to read the whole page yourself.

  • Just remember... (Score:4, Funny)

    by cca93014 ( 466820 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:44AM (#3857692) Homepage
    ...rendering a glass sphere over a chequered floor has NEVER been done before. Try it!

  • POV (Score:2, Informative)

    by prestomation ( 583502 )
    For all you newcomers, POV stands for Persistence-Of-Vision.

  • POV Ray! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Qwerpafw ( 315600 )
    POV Ray is great. I had a quick course in POV-Ray when I was a freshman in high school, and it introduced me to C-like programming, and gavee me a solid understanding of how 3D rendering works. Both have served me well in the years since.

    Plus I made cool art :)

    POV Ray should be taught to all kids to give an understanding of both how computer programming works, and to dispel the notion that everything computers do (and CG in general) is just 'magic.'

    I'd comment on new features, etc etc, except that their website appears to be slashdotted. Maybe in a bit.

  • Render Engine is nice, but modelers? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DG ( 989 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:46AM (#3857720) Homepage Journal
    Is there, anywhere, an open-source modeler that is as easy to use as Lightwave?

    Don't say "Blender" - that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.

    *sigh* I miss LW.

    DG

    • Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:49AM (#3857749) Homepage
      I think Moray is featured on the site. Haven't used either, though. I craft my spheres and checkerboard floors by hand, thank you very much.
      • Moray's not open source, but it is a nice POV-centric modeler. There are also utilities to convert objects created in other modelers to be used with POV; lots of people use those to create objects and then glue it all together with some hand coding.

        There have been attempts to create open source modelers for POV in the past, but they were collaborative projects from the start and the unfortunate truth behind open source is that it seems to work best if one person does a lot of the design and coding before getting all those eyes to debug. Design by committee just seems to lead to stagnation.

        Personally, I do it all by hand, when I actually have time to use POV as opposed to helping write it.
        • I've been using POV-Ray since 0.5 (still have the 5.25 inch floppies I ordered from The Software Labs, as I didn't have anyway to connect my computer to others to get the software back then).

          I've tried various modelers, but always end up going back to coding the scenes by hand. I haven't done much with POV lately, but still always have a copy of the latest release on my machine just incase I feel the need to raytrace. I'll have to snag the latest when the servers cool down a little.

          Thanks for the work, parkrrrr, and the rest of the POV Team.
    • If the OSS tools aren't up to your satisfaction, why not go buy a commercial package and use it?

      The strength of OSS is that you can change it to meet your needs, and that over a long enough timeline this means that it tends to evolve into what the users need it to be. As such, the tools tend to become superior to their competitors in the long run. In the meantime, assuming you're not up to making the changes yourself (don't sweat it -- I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, either), tinkering with the OSS tools and complaining is just a big waste of your time.

      OSS is about freedom as in speech, but as a side effect it also allows freedom as in choice of products (which, contrary to common belief, is what really chafes Bill G's hide). Exercise that.

    • Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @12:03PM (#3857879)
      So many modellers have the opposite problem ... no (free as in freedom) rendering engine. For older versions of POV there were various modellers of various quality ... none quite up to Blender or Lightwave's quality IIRC, though it's been a couple of years since I've looked for one (like you, I'm now back in the market, however).

      Don't say "Blender"

      I agree, but not for the same reason as you. Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...when Blender goes away, all that hard work and all those cool animations become so many random bits.

      - that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.

      Here I disagree. For many things Blender has the easiest interface I've seen (for others things like Lightwave are better). It is different that what users of Lightwave would be used to, but it is by no means obtuse. Indeed, things like their particle system and spline animation controls are fantastic. Just because you're used to something doesn't necessarilly mean thats the best way to go about doing it (the same goes for some Blender bigots who dismiss other modellers as well ... as far as I've seen none of the modellers have a monopoly on the Right Way to do things, and some manage to make things easy that the others complicate, by virtue of the GUI design choices made).

      However, I too would be interested in a good modeller and animation choreographer frontend to POV. Perhaps its time for a few of us to get together and start throwing one together. :-)
      • > Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...when Blender goes away, all that hard work and all those cool animations become so many random bits.

        Now, go away to www.blender3d.com [blender3d.com] and read that page... and then come back and continue to read.

        Yes, Blender is closed sourced, but it will be GPLed or get a similar license, with all old and new development released, hopefully this will happen soon, I long for a new dose of blender...

        For those looking for a pov-modeler take a look at truevision [slashdot.org] seems pretty nice, and probably need a bunch more testing by all of you, so give him/them good bug-reports and feature requests now :)

        • Now, go away to www.blender3d.com [blender3d.com] and read that page... and then come back and continue to read.

          Yes, Blender is closed sourced, but it will be GPLed or get a similar license, with all old and new development released, hopefully this will happen soon, I long for a new dose of blender...

          That is indeed good news (and I've quoted you so that those reading at +2 will see a portion of your comment and perhaps click on 'parent' to read more).

          I've been periodically checking out http://blender.nl/ [blender.nl] for news, but thus far haven't seen anything at all promising. Is there any news on how close the Free Blender Fund is to reaching its 100,000 Euro target for purchasing the sources and releasing it under a Free License?

          In any event, thanks for the very informative link (and you are right, truevision [sourceforge.net] is cool as well).
      • Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...

        True, but it might change [slashdot.org] soon.

        -jfedor
      • If you want an Open Source(BSD style license), multi-platform 3D modeler, check out Wings 3D(http://www.wings3d.com/ [wings3d.com]

        \\Uriel

    • Sounds like a good project, why don't you write one and GPL it? Make it use GTK or QT for the GUI and OpenGL for the wireframing and previewing and whatnot, and backend it to povray.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Lightwave is down to $1,600 right now. I bought it for $1,000 early in the year because they were promoting Video Toaster 2. If you watched a VT2 demonstration, they'd sell you LW 7.5 for $1,000.

      I'd recommend keeping an eye on Newtek's site, they're always running deals like that.

      May I ask why you wanted open source in particular? Just curious because there really isn't a whole lot out there. Lightwave's probably the best deal you're going to get. (unless you want to purchase Maya and Renderman...)
    • To hell with basic modellers I just wish there was a linux native version of poser.

      Poser + lightwave made an awesome combination. and the fact that POVRAY is now pretty damned close to being useable for making most animation shorts or even feature films (NOT for 20billion dollar movies you dummy, for Student or amateur films!) I would love to see more people making animation and physics interfaces... (Yes, I know you can do this already... but I dont want to write a perl program for every different project I do.
  • Four or five years ago, I did some ray tracing based on a LEGO castle I had built. I used Netshade (a version of Rayshade) with a library for the bricks that someone had created.

    Doing a quick Google search, I see that there are now libraries for Povray, as well, now.

    Does anyone have experience with doing this? I'm thinking it would be cool to make a movie of some knights marching through my castle, or a train running around.
    • Check out LDraw. [ldraw.org] It lets you virtually put together a Lego model with unlimited pieces. The web site has links to tools that allow you to render your models in POV-RAY.
  • When I clicked on the pov-ray link there was only one comment and it was already slashdotted... sheesh! Don't you people ever post before you visit links? :)
    • When I clicked on the pov-ray link there was only one comment and it was already slashdotted...

      It got hammered and was down briefly. But the maintainer redid the server to use more of the memory on the box and got it back up pretty quickly. I saw it, and that it was down. Within half-an-hour of that it was back.(He mentioned it was unstable with all the RAM enabled, but unstable is better than just plain not there)

  • If you aren't familiar with povray... (Score:5, Informative)

    by pavos ( 586999 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:47AM (#3857728)
    ...check out the Internet Ray-Tracing Competition at http://www.irtc.org to see what povray is capable of. Besides being a great collection of impressive pictures, it is an invaluable source of objects, textures and techniques for povray beginners and masters alike.

  • While I'm happy to see OS X directly from povray.org instead of some port. I didn't think OS X 10.2 would be available until Auguest 5th.

  • Duckpins II? (Score:3, Funny)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:48AM (#3857742) Homepage Journal
    When is the sequel [cmdrtaco.net]?
  • Post your rays. I haven't seen the great art work of the ray tracer since back in university. Only the nerd of nerds had their own home brewed ray traces. Post it up...

  • I remember... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superdoo ( 13097 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:50AM (#3857753) Homepage
    I remember rendering the included Chess scene on a 386DX33 and it took almot 72 hours at the resolution and quality that we selected. Later, when my parents bought a spiffy brand-new Pentium 100 it took 15 minutes!

    Does anyone else remember POV smacking them in the head with Moore's Law?

    • Re:I remember... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sabalon ( 1684 )
      I used to render some stuff on my 386-33, and then at the last Atlanta Linux Showcase (1998?) they had some beowulf cluster or something running. The display showed something that looked like a quilt of liquid metal with reflections being rendered. It was moving around as if alive.

      Then they said that each frame (at about 30fps) was being rendered real-time by PoV.

      Had what you were talking about taking Lightwave from a 486DX4-20 to a dual PentiumPro200 machine. Slow as hell now :)
    • I discovered POV-Ray on a BBS back in 1995. I had a 386DX-40. My favorite included scene was those funky fish. I remember tracing that scene at 640x480 at full quality with anti-aliasing and it taking a day or two of dedicated compute time (I used the DOS version to squeak every last cylce out of the box). Now I can do that same scene at 1280x1024 in minutes.

      For my own scenes, it was like this: Add an object, start render before bed, see results in morning, add next object, start render before work, see results when I got home. Repeat.

      Gotta love those slow days.

      Some day (maybe 10-20 years from now?) we'll hopefully be able to render our way through POV-Ray scenes in real-time. Wouldn't that be sweet!

      • Actually, I'm hoping for the opposite: that our 3D algorithms keep up with the CPU speed increases. Imagine if you could turn the realisim up even higher, to such a degree that you get even more realistic images/animations (with a detailed physics model), at the cost of taking all night or an eight hour workday to render on a 2Ghz machine.

      • Re:I remember... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ceswiedler ( 165311 )
        The corollary to Moore's law goes something like this: CPU work always expands to fill the processor time available.

        I saw this in college animation courses. A project would take so many man-hours (say 400). Given a faster computer, the finished product might look better (more detailed, higher resolution, etc) but the man-hours were the same.

        The effort required to produce Toy Story or Final Fantasy today is about the same effort which will be required to produce a full-length CG movie in 10 years.

        If this law weren't true, we'd all be watching Tron sequels which take ten minutes to produce.
    • Back in high school, I designed and rendered full-color 3-D covers for our senior yearbook -- front and back rendered at 8.5"x11" at (if I recall correctly) 75dpi. The yearbook committee payed a lot of money to get color laser prints of the front and back covers which were then sent to the publisher. The results were great (award-winning, actually), but I remember each of them took almost two weeks to render on a 486/50DX (not DX2).

      I'm sure it would be mere minutes on this 2.52ghz screamer I have here at work, now. Those were the days though -- models built using a ripped-off copy of 3-D Studio, exported as CSV files (if I recall correctly), manipulated using a bunch of Modula-2 utilities I wrote and rendered using surface textures that had to be created via trial and error.

      The world's changed a lot since then. I'm glad to see POVRay is still around!
    • I worked at a company building a small satellite. For fun in my few off hours, I did a POVray animation illustrating the various stages of deployment - the solar cells deploy, then the first antenna, then the second, etc. I did a small animation on my 100MHz 486 laptop and management commissioned a high quality large animation to be done in 4 days.

      I rigged up 13 unsuspecting computers at the office - just about our entire inventory of brand new P90's. Imagine - over a Gigahertz of processing power at my disposal! Luckily, I had been dabbling in multiprocessing and wrote a simple client and server software to manage it all. Each frame took about 30 minute to render, and the whole thing was done in about 12 hours (300 frames=10 seconds of video).

      The file size was huge - 300 frames of 800x600 uncompressed TGA's = 412 MB. We only had an internal network, so we couldn't use the internet to send it. Luckily, I had just bought a new laptop with a still-mostly-empty 800 MB hard drive. I used a parallel cable to transfer the files onto the drive (If I didn't, I would have filled the network drive), and when I got to the place that was going to transfer the images to video tape, I used laplink again to put the data on their machine (filling their drive, too!).

      Eventually, I'd like to make an mpeg of it so I can show friends. Any suggestions for a free encoder?
      • Thanks everyone...

        Here's the video (2.8 MB) [maushammer.com]. It should take about 10 more minutes to ftp up. There is no soundtrack, so I'll give the narration here:

        The satellite is called GEMstar and was designed to provide SMS-like messaging all over the world. It was built circa 1994-5 and was lost when the rocket blew up. That didn't stop me from producing the video of what it would have looked like!

        The video shows a couple of stages that occur when the satellite is released from the rocket. First, it initially tumbles. Then the solar panels deploy (like everything else, they had to be squeezed in to fit in the nosecone of the rocket). The attitude control system (ACS) turns on and stabalizes the spin of the satellite so that it faces towards the earth. This is done with momentum wheels (heavy wheels inside the satellite) and torq coils (coils that act against the earth's magnetic field). Next, the main helicial antenna is deployed, and it's ready for service!

        A few notes on the parts of the satellite. The blue panels are solar cells. The gold ring at the bottom is the seperation ring that attaches the whole thing to the rocket. The 4 white squares on top are GPS antennas connected to a special receiver that can measure the phase difference between the antennas and therefore figure out (not only x,y,z and time) its pitch, roll, and yaw. The X-shaped thing on the top of the satellite is a gravity gradient boom. Deployment of this probably should have been in the video, but oh well. It pops out maybe 10 feet and, due to some simple physics I don't understand, will help orient the satellite so that it faces the earth. (In reality, the satellite isn't staying still, it has to constantly re-aim to keep pointing at the earth). On the side panel, the little circle is a window for the earth sensor. There is another one on the other side, and they help orient the satellite.

        Antennas- The 4 blade antennas are for command & control. These form a broad pattern and are useful to talk to the satelite when the main antennas aren't pointed correctly (like when there is a problem). Being a broader pattern, they require more power.

        The boom antenna has two elements - a larger 150 Mhz antenna to receive transmissions from ground users (who transmit on less licensed taxicab-like frequencies), and a smaller ~400 MHz transmit antenna at the tip. This antenna was the hardest part of the animation because there were no 'spiral' primitives in POVray. I ended up writing a little program in C to generate a bunch of triangle strips, and then used 4 copies of this (at 90, 180, and 270 degrees). The deployment is totally bogus - I just scaled the structure, when in reality the width of the strips don't change.

        True story: our competitor at the time was Orbital with their series of ORBcomm satellites. They used a similar antenna structure, but theirs folded up sideways, like a staw that has been rolled up. Our antenna was made of metal, plastic, and fiberglass - theirs was made of copper tape, kapton (a space-rated scotch tape), and bamboo. I never thought that anyone would fly a wooden satellite!
    • A few degrees off topic, but I once downloaded a nice fractal, appropriately named "Longtime" ... textfile said it took TWO WEEKS to render on a 486. Eeep!!

    • Still insanely easy to do if you make enough transparent objects and raise the number of times a ray can split as it passes through such items (try setting max_trace_level to 100 from it's very low "normal" value.) I had a scene of different colored glass slabs that just didn't look right with the default value. Looks great with max_trace_level at 100, but rendering about 100 small frames for animation took a month on a Pentium 166. It still bogs down my AMD, a large still of the same model can take days.

    • Re:I remember... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      POV smacking them in the head with Moore's Law?

      I started out on POV with a 486SX-33. The SX series had no floating point math unit. I spent a WEEK rendering a 120 frame animation, prolly 160 by 120 pixels. I immediately mailed away for a top-of-the-line 486-DX66 (does have the math unit) for $660. I was then able to render the same animation in about 12 hours. Now-a-days I could prolly render it at 640x480 while I eat a snack :)

      -

    • Yes, I remember when I found out about Pov-Ray. It was version 3.0 something, fitted on a single floppy disk mounted on the cover of PC-Format. The cover art was Mike Meyer's awesome render of a malicious jack-in-the-box riding a roller coaster.

      At that time I was using a sluggish 386SX-16. I still got hooked to ray-tracing, even if it took ages to get even a low-quality sample render done. Nowadays, with GHz processors, the best renders still take days to finish. Only the amount of detail and polish has risen to obscene heights.

      When it comes to Moore's Law, I remember seeing a nice comment about CPU speeds and Pov-Ray: Personal computers are fast enough when one of them is enough to render a complete movie in real-time, using POV. Considering that animation studios use huge render farms and more optimized renderers, we still have a long way to go :)

  • Rendering Times... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phraktyl ( 92649 ) <wyatt@@@draggoo...com> on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:50AM (#3857757) Homepage Journal
    I spent many hours mucking about with POV back in the day. Course CPUs are a little faster now, so I guess is those render times don't suck as bad.
    Not necessarily. I've been using POV-Ray for years, and while the machines have gotten faster, the scenes have gotten more complex with regards to reflection and such, and I'm using more anti-aliasing right along with it. Offhand, I'd say my render times are roughly about the same as they were nearly 10 years ago.

  • POV 3.5 (Score:2, Informative)

    by Agent_Eight ( 237857 )
    POV has got to be the most interesting free software ever put out. If you havn't heard of POV before or just didn't bother to check it out, I'd recommend it. While it easy enough for just about anyone to learn, It's script based nature makes it an ideal artistic outlet for programmers.

    My hat's off to the POVDEV team, it was worth the wait!

    I just hope it manages to get mirrored before the rest of the /. community decides to check it out. The site was slow enough with all those who had been playing around with the beta's .... I did find it amusing that I was downloading the 3.5 package at 3.5kbps.

  • Things to try (Score:3, Insightful)

    by oliverthered ( 187439 ) <{moc.liamtoh} {ta} {derehtrevilo}> on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:52AM (#3857771) Journal
    Many years ago I put a few enhancments into my onw build of POV

    write out a z buffer with the image using -z at the command line.

    and some changes that allow colour gradients to be used for normal gradients.

    They still don't seem to have that stuff in pov 3.5

    I've also got a reasonable (but 4 years old!) fractal landscape generator I wrote for POV,

    oh and when compiled with djgpp I got a 5% performance boost over the stock dos build.

    those were the days.
    • write out a z buffer with the image using -z at the command line.

      You can get at the Z buffer, just not from the command line. There is a debugging thing to let you do it, I've used it to try to figure out why some of my scenes didn't come out as I planned. You can also get the alpha chanel rendered directly into PNGs...

      and some changes that allow colour gradients to be used for normal gradients.

      You can do that now, it looks like 3.5 finaly unifyes all the patterns. Plus you can supply your own functions and us uv-maps!

      I've also got a reasonable (but 4 years old!) fractal landscape generator I wrote for POV,

      I have a rolercoaster "construction kit" I did about the same time. Maybe we should combine them, since I just put my coaster over water...(and it took me forever to find out that no_shadows also canceled the fake caustics!)

  • Whack-a-server advanced... (Score:4, Funny)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <.adavis. .at. .ubasics.com.> on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:53AM (#3857780) Homepage Journal
    I get the distinct impression the slashdot editors are playing advanced "Whack-A-Server" lately.

    -Adam

  • povray is not open source (Score:3, Informative)

    by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:54AM (#3857792) Homepage

    PovRay is not open source, but rather has a very complicated licensing scheme [povray.org]. Not only that, care must be taken to be sure even that an image you produce with PovRay is legal to distribute, since there are rather severe licensing restrictions on many of the object description files provided with PovRay you must read these carefully to be sure that what you are doing is legal.

    • Re:povray is not open source (Score:4, Informative)

      by Agent_Eight ( 237857 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @12:04PM (#3857881) Homepage
      It's not as restricting as you make it out to be. The source is available to anyone. Yes, there are restrictions as to how you build it. For instance, you can't use the POVengine as the core of your own program. POV was designed as an individual entity. Yes, you can write your own extensions that link to the program via API hooks ... The Moray modeling program is an example of this.

      As far as scene files and generated images ... hey your free to do whatever you want with the images. The Scene Description Language (SDL) files can be distributed as well. The language specification itself on the other hand is obviously something they don't want you to copy, but what did you expect.

      Hang around the POV newsgroups, you'll find it to be a very friendly and supportive community. A good number of those on the development team are there to answer questions. I've been hooked on POV since 92 and I'll continue to support them in whatever way possible.

      • Agent_Eight writes: As far as scene files and generated images ... hey your free to do whatever you want with the images.

        This is incorrect: read the license [povray.org] again. You are not permitted to make any derivative works using the files in the SCENES directory, except for those in its INCDEMO subdirectory, or distribute such works, unless the file itself explicitly grants this permission, and most do not. Copying any text out of one of the supplied scenes files for use in a description of your own image would be to make a derivative work.

        If enforced strictly, it would be dangerous to even read the scenes files if you later on plan to use povray to make similar images, though in practice this is unlikely to be enforced.

        • Ok, I may have misunderstood your original post. Yes, the SCENES directory is mostly protected. Seems fair since it contains files that other people created and allowed to be used to demonstrate what POV was capable of. Things like this get debated all the time on the newgroups between users and the POVDEV team. DERIVITIVE works applies to throwing the whole file into something else and calling it your own. Copying bits and pieces is part of the educational process that they were provided for.

          If enforced strictly, it would be dangerous to even read the scenes files if you later on plan to use povray to make similar images, though in practice this is unlikely to be enforced.

          Your right about the wording of the license,and yes, it's not likely to be enforced. In later versions, the license will become even more liberal (maybe even open source?)
          The license does a pretty good job of explaining why the software isn't open source right now.

          Thier biggest concern is with people charging for free software without letting people know they are paying for something that is free.

    • Re:povray is not open source (Score:5, Informative)

      by parkrrrr ( 30782 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @12:09PM (#3857920)
      It's true that POV is not open source. There's a very good reason for that: we can't reach many of the people who contributed the original code under the old license, so we don't have the right to just switch the license. We'll have to rewrite some pretty big chunks of code before we can think about a more open license. That (the rewrite) is slated to happen for the next major release.

      As for the object files, I think that if you read carefully you'll find that the only restrictions are on the use of the files in the samples directory; the POV-Team doesn't own the copyright on those files so the restrictions on those files are an unfortunate necessity. The standard include files and macros, though, are free to be used for any purpose:

      The user is also granted the right to use the scene files, fonts,

      bitmaps, and include files distributed in the INCLUDE and
      SCENES\INCDEMO sub-directories in their own scenes. Such permission
      does not extend to any other files in the SCENES directory or its
      sub-directories. The SCENES files are for your enjoyment and
      education but may not be the basis of any derivative works unless the
      file in question explicitly grants permission to do such.
      • That's a good reason to have contributers assign the copyright to you when they contribute the patches. Note that's not assigning the credit, just the copyright. It makes a bunch of things simpler. If one person owns the copyright, then one person can litigate in case someone steals the code and violates the license.

        And, it makes it simple to change the licence too.
    • While you are correct in pointing out that POV-RAY isn't free software (and probably doesn't meet the "open source" definition either), the license isn't as draconian or bad as you make it out to be.

      Not only that, but the developers plan on doing a rewrite for version 4, that will allow them to release it under a more permissive license (remember, lots of people contributed to the project under the current license, so chaning it is hard).

      The most restrictive part of the license has to do with using other artists' images, which really isn't too terribly different from any other modellers or renderers out there. While I support and advocate Free Media [expressivefreedom.org] and a public commons of art for all of us to draw upon in our creativity, this restriction is on the art, not the use of the software.

      From the horses mouth:
      While this explanation doesn't really belong in this document, we are asked it often enough that we have decided to put it here. While the POV-Ray(TM) source code is freely available, it isn't 'open' according to the currently popular definition of the term (meaning that it isn't available to create derivative works other than fully functional versions of POV-Ray). The reasons for this are historical. Primarily, at the time that POV-Ray(TM) was originally developed (starting in about 1990), on Compuserve, it was a different environment than today. Virtually none of the developers had internet access and there wasn't a great awareness of things like the GPL. The team at that time rolled their own license - one that allowed free use of the software but attempted to prevent people taking unfair advantage of it.


      As people contributed code to POV-Ray(TM) over the years - and there have been many instances of this - they contributed it to us on the understanding that it would be covered by the POV-Ray(TM) license, as it stood at the time. Now, in 2001, we find that in many cases we don't know who wrote what part of the code, or that the author is uncontactable. We simply don't have the right to arbitrarily change the terms under which their source code is distributed. Even though it was contributed to us, we feel that we must honor the terms under which it was given. Therefore, POV- Ray(TM) will remain on this existing license until we do a full re-write (which is intended for v4), at which time a new license will be instituted that is far more liberal in terms of reuse.
      [Reference [216.239.35.100]]

      It seems relatively clear to me that they would like to release the next version, once it has been rewritten, under a GPL-type license (probably not a *BSD style license based on their historical experiences with people remarketing their work, which led to this somewhat restrictive license in the first place). Their license predates the GPL, and they seem to imply at several points that the GPL, or a license like it, would be sufficient to protect their concerns and guarantee the freedom of their project, which if you read the history section of the aforequoted document, is their main concern.

  • And don't forget Fractint! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by farrellj ( 563 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @11:54AM (#3857793) Homepage Journal
    Fractint and POV-Ray were the first real popular open source graphics tools out there.Fractint brought the Mandelbrot set rendering time from a half hour or so to under a couple of minutes on a 386 system. It is great for providing textures to be mapped on to objects in POV-Ray. You can get it at www.fractint.org...and follow the links to which version you want for what platform.

    ttyl
    Farrell

  • I 3 POV-Ray! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by cybermace5 ( 446439 )
    It's really difficult to think of another freeware program that has the longevity and success of POV-Ray.

    There are some really powerful tools in this new version. I still find it hard to believe the results possible with POV-Ray...with this and GIMP, you can make great graphics for web pages or excellent digital art. All without spending thousands of dollars on expensive software.

    It's also a great tool for teaching kids programming concepts. While you're not creating a program, the syntax is very C-like. You can create macros, apply properties to objects...a few years back I introduced POV-Ray to one of my younger sisters. With absolutely no previous experience in programming, she was creating very interesting scenes in a few hours. It's easy to get kids involved when there are such immediate, and often beautiful, results. You can't get them excited about writing a "Hello, World" dialog box function.

    Get out there and start rendering!

  • C'mon...it's been in the 3.x release series for as long as I can remember. LW is at 7 now and even Maya is at 4.

    How can this be any good. Perhaps they should release POVRay2002 instead. ;)
  • Wow! I remember using MORAY (a modeller) and POV on my 386, probably about 10 years ago. That was some pretty cool stuff, but I can remember rendering times > 10 hours. Oh, how times have changed.

    From a quick search on the internet, it appears that MORAY still exists, but the link I found to their homepage was down. Does anyone around here use MORAY as their modeller?

  • Cluster POVray (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nate1138 ( 325593 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @12:03PM (#3857875)
    Not only is it fast and featured, but it runs on clusters, using mpi-povray. This site [demon.co.uk] has info on doing it with 3.1, does anyone know if 3.5 works w/clusters??

  • Using POV-Ray on cluster systems (Score:3, Informative)

    by Hassan79 ( 583923 ) <nikd-0202&gmx,net> on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @12:18PM (#3857978)
    There are some patches for POV-Ray that enable parallel rendering on multiple machines, unfortunately not yet for the new version:
    I hope that there will be something like this for version 3.5 soon.
    • What about multiple processors? I haven't been able to hook up with www.povray.org yet (./ effect) so no flames about not reading the change log.

      But it always bugged me that POVRAY didn't have better support for multiprocessor systems. Oh sure, you could run two instances of Povray for the top and bottom halves of your image, then splice them together; but why dump that on the end user? Wouldn't it be trivial for the developers to assign each successive pixel to a new process?

      I hope 3.5 will automagically detect and use multiple processors. Then I'll worry about getting multiple machines hooked up. :)
  • These days there are a lot of tools available to help you model complex objects/scenes and realistic landscape with povray, but I have always been amazed by the stuff rendered by early pov artists like Dan Farmer, Truman Brown and most notably, Mike Miller. Those guys put out amazing stuff when there were no modellers targeting pov available. Search the web for their work; unfortunately, most of these gems were written for pov 1.x/2.x and I don't know how easy it is to make them compile with the latest version.

  • I used to have lots of fun with the DOS versions of POV-Ray.

    The graphics of today's games like Unreal Tournament & Quake3 remind me of scenes from the old DOS POV. I'm all into frames per second now, not seconds per frame! :)

    I'd still like to see what a modern raytracer can do though.

  • Looks like the Povray's been Slashdotted... (Score:5, Funny)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @12:39PM (#3858140) Homepage Journal
    I copied the screen shots:

    1st Screenshot:
    Blue Sky

    Reflective-Ball

    Ground Made of Grid Lines

    2nd Screenshot:
    Star Feild
    Ball
    Ball
    Reflective-Ball

    Ball

    Ground made of Grid-Lines

    3rd Screenshot:
    Fog

    Top side of Cube
    Fog
    Left Side of Cube
    Right Side of Cube
    Fog
    Water with waves in it

    LamnessFilter: fka;jdk;dskdsjnxz.,nweqhkljasdnm,Z.fdhjfahvcmv,znc xvhjlkafhdscnxz.mcn,mvxhfsjalkfhkvanc,.zn
    dfsafds afdsfdsafjdsa;lfkdsafkd;lkdsaj
    fsdak;jdsfkljdsa;l fjds;lfsa;lksajfk4eu8cxvzjk

  • I have found POV-Ray to be a pretty useful tool. Most people probably think about rendering some nice scenes when POV-Ray is mentioned. Well, it can be used on other stuff too.

    I have rendered user interface components for games with POV-Ray. Basically I have built a .inc files which consist of the interface primitives (some macro "functions"). The .pov files contain the real user interface components. Using a config.inc and some scripts you can parametrize the whole system. You can change textures, sizes, lighting and so forth on by editing the config.inc and render the components with one shell script. Also, it is easy to produce nice alpha masks (to get rig of the background) to the components by fiddling with textures and lighting. It doesn't take too many lines of code to combine the masks and the images (in PNG format). You know, a rendering pipeline, a programmer compatible way doing graphics, beats Photoshop anytime :)

    POV-Ray can also be used as a plain texture generator.

    I wish that POV-Ray had a more powerful macro language. Or, awwwww, maybe even a proper scripting language. At the moment you have to use all sorts of external magic to generate POV-Ray files to get what you want.

  • Best software project ever (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jon Peterson ( 1443 ) <jon.snowdrift@org> on Wednesday July 10, 2002 @01:11PM (#3858464) Homepage
    I saw someone else say the same thing, but can't hunt back to their post to reply. Oh Well.

    Anyway, I first used POV in 1993, and it got me hooked on the whole computer thing. I'd never have learned Perl except to auto-generate my POV scripts. I'd never have learned Unix except so I could run POV on the university RS6000's instead of the 386DX's. Gee, I owe my career to POV!

    Comp.graphics.raytracing, and later comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing were the two best newgroups I ever read, and epitomised all that was (note the past tense!) good about usenet. I wrote a tutorial for POV 2.0 when it came out, and helped set up a web competition still going today (http://www.irtc.org/).

    The people were friendly and helpful, flame wars were almost unheared of and religious technology wars were rare. People joined the community, stayed in the community, and helped others enter the community.

    People wrote a plethora of supporting utilities, and it really was an application that brought an otherwise inaccessible area of computing within reach of anyone.

    Today, CGI is so common in film and TV that POV-Ray's images have little wow factor. Low-end commercial tools like strata 3D are much more affordable and accessible.

    Nonetheless, raytracing still produces images with a unique feel, and I'm sure people still get enormous pleasure (and excellent spatial reasoning practice!!) from using POV-Ray. Unless they've changed it radically, the Scene Description Language used by POV was one of the most elegant and well designed declaritive languages I've ever come across in computing. XML and every configuration file I've seen is an ugly hack in comparison. And don't even mention VRML ;-)

    Go go POV team!!!!

    • Disclaimer: I hear what you're saying. Raytracing with POV-Ray is a fun passtime. However...

      Nonetheless, raytracing still produces images with a unique feel [...]

      Only in bad raytracers. Good rendered images (raytraced or otherwise) don't look like raytraced images unless the user specifically wants them to.

      No arguing over taste, of course, but I find raytraced images that look raytraced distracting as hell.

  • The Mac version is a Carbon application, so it doesn't have the characteristic speedy feel of a true Unix application, but hey it's still POV so I can't really disparage it. Hopefully the developers will see fit to make a Cocoa version of the program for a future release.
  • Back when I was on my amiga, rendering (raytracing) let's say "a typical nice image" back then would require me ~30min-1h per frame without trying to optimize the scene and all.

    Today you get 200X faster processors, yes, but at the same time, you get caustics, radiosity, Subsurface Scattering, Volumetrics and loads of plugins/shaders that are sometimes *very* Cpu intensive. These things are an evolution of the rendering pipeline that arrived because of a lot of R&D but also because more power is available to plug these new features in (rendering hair 10 years ago was a simple polygon with hair texture on it, or polygon strands that looked terrible :) ).

    So while the CPUs right now are going faster and faster, the evolution of the quality and complexity of the images also went up at the same time, thus cancelling the speed increase for mid to high-end work.

    Production houses still require a renderfarm, testing some specific scenes still requires to reduce the resolution to something very small or to sample limited region in the camera viewport.

    Of course if you don't want to do any raytracing and do simple model and lighting and make it look quake-like, you won't need a renderfarm, for a flying logo with nothing fancy, it's hell of a lot faster, but for most 3D artists, they still have a good excuse to go to the coffee machine :).

    I don't know about POVRay, I've always been a lightwave user, but if they've catched up with the new rendering algorythms for the above features I mentionned, they are going to tax the cpu as much as raytracing taxed machines in the mid 80s.

  • International mirrors (Score:2, Informative)

    by parkrrrr ( 30782 )
    Sorry about the extra spaces in these URLs...

    http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.povray.org/pub /p ovray/Official/
    ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mir ror/povray/povray /Official/
    ftp://sunsite.wits.ac.za/pub/mirrors/f tp.povray.or g/povray/Official/
    ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/graphics /raytracing/povray/O fficial/
    ftp://ftp.etsimo.uniovi.es/pub/raytrace/ povray/Off icial/
    ftp://kermit.stud.fh-heilbronn.de/mirrors/ povray/O fficial/
    ftp://ring.asahi-net.or.jp/pub/misc/povr ay/Officia l/

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