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POV-Ray 3.6 Released 201

Posted by michael from the hamster-havoc dept.
ehmdjii writes "After a long betatesting-phase the POV-Ray team just released version 3.6 of the popular opensource raytracer. It's been two years since the last version and many bugs have been fixed as well as some changes in the render core. This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations."
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POV-Ray 3.6 Released More

POV-Ray 3.6 Released

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  • What this really means ... ;-) (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:02AM (#9418171)
    Ahh, I love geek-speak.

    This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations.

    Translation:

    We know this shit is kind of broken, but we've cleaned it up best we can; here, we've tried to make sense of it; could someone who knows what they're doing maybe come in and rewrite it for us?

    ;-) (I'm just teasing, of course! :-) POVRay is one of the best rendering systems out there, free or not.)

    • Re:What this really means ... ;-) (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Speaking of re-implementations, though, consider that the latest whiz-bang GPUs from NVIDIA and ATI can put together images of essentially the quality of those shown in the POV-RAY hall of fame [povray.org] in real-time. A great re-implementation would be a POV-Ray to OpenGL translator that uses vendor-specific extensions as necessary to let your video card handle the actual mathematics of rendering. If done well, it could also be applied to animation sequences instead of just static images, and the result would be a v
      • I really don't think that game graphics are anywhere near the level of high-quality raytraced images. If I'm wrong, please post screenshots. The graphics in Far Cry, as an example, are the best I've seen, but not as good as quality ray-traced images.

        I don't know if you know this, but the methods of raytracing and those used in 3D games are pretty different in how they work, from what I understand. Raytracing is also quite different from most 3D rendering applications. POVRay uses relatively "pure" mathe
        • You will occasionally hear a game engine claim to use ray tracing. What they do in that case is bounce a beam from the camera to check if a polygon is visible. It's not the same thing.

          I've been ray tracing since BOB, a precursor to pov-ray that was published as floppies bundled with a textbook. Back when a complex vga resolution render would take a few days on a 386.

          The theory hasn't changed much. Just the efficiency of the algorythems, and of course, the horsepower of the computers.

        • He didn't say that games do it, he said that the GPUs can do it. Look at some of the tech demos...

          Specifically, have a look at:
          http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/rx800.htm l

          Click on the Quicktime of the Ruby demo...

          You want to click on "the doublecross" this is a realtime rendering that can be done on the newest ATI GPUs. Alternatively, if you HAVE one of the newest ATI GPUs, download the executables and watch them render in realtime...

          I'll agree it isn't perfect yet, but it is a big step above Far Cr

          • Holy *#%@#$%! (Score:3, Informative)

            by emarkp ( 67813 )
            Thanks for the link! Not the Ruby clip. Check out the Subsurface Scattering demo. That's some of the most impressive work to come out of Siggraph in the past few years, and one of the reasons Gollum looked so good in LotR. See here [ucsd.edu] for more.

            Implemented in a video card in real time? Wow. I'm impressed.

      • Show me a GPU that turns a 24KB input file into this [oyonale.com] and I might be inclined to believe you.

  • Woo! (Score:5, Funny)

    by orangesquid ( 79734 ) <orangesquid AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:03AM (#9418175) Homepage Journal
    Povray, like circleMUD [circlemud.org], is one of those software packages whose releases seem to come few and far-between, but are often worth it...

    I, for one, welcome our new chrome-sphere-over-checkboard overlords.

    You know, a friend of mine, after I installed povray on his machine, asked me, "So, where's the GUI...?" ;)

    • Re:Woo! (Score:3, Informative)

      by cammoblammo ( 774120 )
      POV-Ray doesn't have a GUI, but GUI front ends have been written for it. I've used the KDE Povray modeller which is sort of nice, but I found I had to learn the language first, by which time I found it easier to just use the language. It's not that reliable, either. Good try though.

    • GUI (Score:4, Informative)

      by squidfrog ( 765515 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @09:36AM (#9419765) Homepage
      Moray's [stmuc.com] an excellent modeller for POV-Ray. The author does a great job of keeping up with the latest capabilities of POV, even when major features are added. You can use photons, radiosity, etc., all without hand-editing the resulting POV-code. But for those who do enjoy writing POV-code by hand, Moray's convenient for those situations where you wonder what command you need to do X, and where exactly it goes in the code...

  • PovRay OpenSource? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:09AM (#9418192) Homepage
    If povray is open source then why does Debian have it in the non-free category?

    • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:5, Informative)

      by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:11AM (#9418201) Journal
      Its not GPL, it was started years ago under a different license.

      • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Sheriff Fatman ( 602092 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:29AM (#9418255) Homepage

        Not only was POV distributed under it's own license, the maintainers had (have?) a policy of identifying people and organisations who violated their license terms in the next update of the license document. The v3.1 license states:

        Revocation Of License

        VIOLATION OF THIS LICENSE IS A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAWS. IT WILL RESULT IN REVOCATION OF ALL DISTRIBUTION PRIVILEGES AND MAY RESULT IN CIVIL OR CRIMINAL PENALTY.

        Such violators who are prohibited from distribution will be identified in this document.

        In this regard, "PC Format", a magazine published by Future Publishing, Ltd. in the United Kingdom, distributed incomplete versions of POV-Ray 1.0 in violation the license which was effect at the time. They later attempted to distribute POV-Ray 2.2 without prior permission of the POV- Team in violation the license which was in effect at the time. There is evidence that other Future Publishing companies have also violated our terms. Therefore "PC Format", and any other magazine, book or CD-ROM publication owned by Future Publishing is expressly prohibited from any distribution of POV-Ray software until further notice.

        Up until I first noticed this passage in one of their licenses, I really never stopped to think about the difference between open source / freeware / PD / shareware - it was the first time I realised that giving away your software doesn't mean you're giving away your rights as well. The irony, of course, is that I first got into POV-Ray after finding v1.0 on a "PC Format" cover diskette. :)

        • Specific Vengeance License (Score:5, Funny)

          by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @10:37AM (#9420354) Homepage Journal

          Whoah!

          Can you imagine pissing off the authors of an open source project so much that they specifically name you in their modified license?!?

          This would be akin to a modified GPL version 4,

          "whereas, be it known, that all of the aforementioned rights are completely and utterly revoked, in perpetuity for Darl McBride, business associates of Darl McBride, and all his descendents are likewised to be cursed and spat upon, even unto the fourth generation. He shall have no community rights whatsoever, neither shall his name be uttered in any sacred place, nor his handiwork to be exhibited with 100 feet of a sacred place, school nor voting booth....

    • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SLi ( 132609 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:25AM (#9418245)
      POV-Ray is not open source. The license forbids, among others, commercial distribution. In fact now that I read the 3.6 license [povray.org], it seems to forbid distribution, PERIOD.

      This seems to be an interesting contrast to this comment [slashdot.org] where someone (apparently a POV-Ray developer?) discusses plans to release POV-Ray under an open source license and explains why this is not currently possible:

      "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."

      • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:2, Informative)

        by zz99 ( 742545 )
        POV-Ray is not open source

        POV-Ray is not free software. But it seems to be open source. At their web site there are links that seems to point at the source [povray.org]

        • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:3, Informative)

          by SLi ( 132609 )
          POV-Ray is not open source according to the generally recognized definition of open source [opensource.org].

          Satisfied?

          • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:2, Insightful)

            by RogL ( 608926 )
            Don't you mean "the source is open, but it's not Open Source" ?

            It's not *closed* source if you can download the source; if you mean "it's not GPL", why not say that?
            • I don't mean it's not GPL - I mean it's not open source. It's also not closed source.

              The term "open source" has never had the meaning "software with source code available". Prior to being used to describe software that meets certain openness criteria, it simply did not exist. Instead you would have said something along the lines of, well, "software with source code available".

              Of course now that it has a commonly accepted definition, some people would like to distort it by claiming that it simply means "wi
              • Also I must add that GPL != open source.

                Any software distributed under the GPL is open source, but not all open source software is distributed under the GPL. Other common licenses include X11, BSD, MIT and LGPL.

      • Re:PovRay OpenSource? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Doppleganger ( 66109 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:14AM (#9418494) Journal
        If you're going to discuss distribution terms, you might want to look at the distributor's license [povray.org]. It has a lot of legalese in it (and IANAL), but it looks like it has fairly lenient terms for inclusion into an open-source OS distribution.

        The header of the license you linked points out that it is for end-users only, not distributors.
        • Thanks, I missed that.

          It's still very restrictive: It for example forbids distributing ANY derived code, or even renaming anything. Clause 4.5 even effectively prevents including it in any (IMO) sane static (i.e. CD or such) distribution planned to be current for more than two years.

          In fact it seems to me even more non-free than things like Shared Source :(
          • Personally, I'd wonder if it would satisfy that particular clause to just automatically say that the software is old and newer versions can be found at the website. It wasn't too long ago that just about every program came with such a disclaimer to cover the times when some years-old copy was found on a backwater ftp or bbs site.

            Not allowing distributions of modified versions would probably be the main sticking point. Though that might not prevent inclusion of patches that the user can apply.

      • Rules on distribution found inside the license page, or here [povray.org].

        Basically, they require you to get permission to distribute it commercially, or even as a file posted on your webpage or P2P software, but you're free to give it out to your students, your peons, or your friends.

        I'd like to provide text, but the formatting they have there... it would likely come out horribly mangled here. But follow the link and look at section 3.1

      • While they are at it, a real scripting interface would be nice. Yes it's cute that they are slowly adding loops and whatnot to their description language, but if it was tied to a python or TCL interpreter, you could unleash a database backend onto it.

  • Great POV-Ray artist: (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:10AM (#9418196)
    Take a look at this site:

    http://www.oyonale.com/
    http://www.oyonale.com/ histoire/francais/index.htm

    Gorgeous stuff! All rendered with POV-Ray!

  • Awesome! (Score:4, Funny)

    by PovRayMan ( 31900 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:13AM (#9418208) Homepage
    This is most excellent news as always.

    As a long time POV-Ray user (Abuser?) I've kinda fallen off watching the development since the official felt like it slowned after the big 3.1 release. It's nice to see a strong, friendly community surrounding POV-Ray even though it pales in comparison to larger 3d programs. Even so, I still feel that learning how to use POV-Ray is a great introduction to 3d and coding.

    In celebration of 3.6, I bring you this lovely scene.
    camera{ location <0,5,-10> look_at <0,2.5,0>}
    light_source{<10,10,-10> color rgb 1}
    plane{y,0 pigment{checker rgb 0, rgb 1}}
    sphere{<-5,4,5>,2 pigment{rgb 1} finish{reflection 1}}
    sphere{<5,4,12>,3 pigment{rgb 1} finish{reflection 1}}
    sphere{<0,1,0>,1 pigment{rgb 1} finish{reflection 1}}
    Thank you developers, helpers, users and everyone else within the community. You all help make POV-Ray kick ass to this very day.

  • Gilles Tran! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:16AM (#9418216) Homepage
    I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran [oyonale.com], creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro [oyonale.com]), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...

    Highly recommended!

    • Re:Gilles Tran! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by black mariah ( 654971 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:51AM (#9418318)
      What's really cool is that every time I've emailed him about even the stupidest POV-related item, he's replied and been super cool about it. I interviewed him a couple of years back for a website that never got around to publishing the article. One of the renders he did took nearly six months to finish. Long live the P200, I guess. :D

      • Re:Gilles Tran! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        My apartment's decorated with his works -- many of which he sells here [zazzle.com]

        I also stand-by your "really cool about email" comment. One of his works' wasn't available in his gallery, I emailed him; and he got back to me when he did a high-res render and published it!

      • Re:Gilles Tran! (Score:4, Informative)

        by afidel ( 530433 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @07:57AM (#9418891)
        I remember rendering the trainstation demo on my 486-SX25. Thing took 7 days to complete at 800*600 3 ray no AA. Today I can render that image at 1600*1200 insane ray level with full multipass AA and it will only take seconds. Kind of puts computing performance increases into perspective.

        • Re:Gilles Tran! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by JDevers ( 83155 )
          Well, with the 486DX it would have been insanely faster even then. You were having to emulate FP math with the SX.

  • Cool stuff. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by noselasd ( 594905 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:18AM (#9418221)
    Seems like povray is used for many cool things.
    e.g. rendering mars [swin.edu.au]. Also done here [uni-muenchen.de]

    • Re:Cool stuff. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Orp ( 6583 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @08:15AM (#9418996) Homepage
      I also use PoV-Ray to render numerically modeled thunderstorms using isosurfaces. I've submitted an article to Linux Journal on how I modified the pov source to read my model data - dunno if it will be published or not.

      See http://research.orf.cx for pics.

  • I'm a fan (Score:4, Interesting)

    by danormsby ( 529805 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:21AM (#9418231) Homepage
    I'm a big fan of POV-Ray. I've been using it for years to illustrate chemistry through on-line animations [leeds.ac.uk].
  • I know this is kind of off topic, but here goes anyway:

    I used to use POV-Ray on a 486 in the early nineties, writing scenes by hand. At the time there was a POV artist called Mike Miller, who has created some very impressive scenes by the standars of yesteryear.

    Does anyoe know what happened to Mike? It seems he disappeared from the POV scene completely. I bet some Slashdot reader is bound to know... Or not?

  • I'm still dreaming (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ballpoint ( 192660 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:30AM (#9418264)
    of the day when complex POV scenes can be rendered by hardware at 1920x1080 @ 60 fps.

    Will that day come in the next 40 years, or even ever ?

  • Photon speed improvements (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kippesoep ( 712796 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:40AM (#9418292) Homepage
    Cool! They've changed the speed of light!

  • A very good tool. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saggi ( 462624 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:58AM (#9418331) Homepage
    I have been using PovRay for many years now as well as other professional tools. I also work with coding of 3D engines.

    I would say a few things in regard to PovRay.

    1) It is a complete ray tracer.
    2) Its interface is not as good as (some of) the pro-tools, but...
    3) Its open source.

    Item 1. PovRay support all you need to render images in 3D. Just look at their site, in the hall of fame. The rainy street image is amazing.

    Item 2. This is probable the issue that will be discussed most. But I believe the interface developed over the years (originally I worked with PovRay way back when it didn't have a GUI) - is now at a level where it is useful for anyone who which to use it. Of cause you need to think mathematically about 3D, rather than visual. There is not any drag and drop functionality where you can add a box, a cone etc. to your scene. This scares a lot of people away, but most of the professionals I have worked with, and most of my own work, the drag-drop-icon-what-ever GUI is not really that useful. You always end up entering some popup box to insert the exact measurements of you box, cone, sphere...

    Item 3. Yes! I once was in a project where we needed a 3D engine to display the results we made. (The project itself was not related to 3D at all, but we needed a good way to display the complex set of results and date.) We made it in such a way that it displayed the results as pov-ray data files, and integrated it into powray. It was awesome. I don't know of any other product that would allow you to do this. Most of the integration was related to Item 2 above, as pov-ray uses text based and script like files as input. This is ideal for programs to handle as their output. Try to do that in any other program.

    In relation to all the items above, I believe you have to be slightly nerdish or mathematically minded in order to fully benefit from PovRay - but then again, welcome to Slashdot.
    • It's been several years since I last looked at POVRay, so forgive this excited outburst:

      POVRay has a GUI now? COOL!

    • Re:A very good tool. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:07AM (#9418473) Homepage
      No, POV-Ray is not open source. From the copying conditions [debian.org]:
      WHY ISN'T POV-RAY OPEN SOURCE ?

      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). 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.

      In fact, that is from the copying conditions for 3.5; the end user licence agreement [povray.org] for 3.6 seems to be more restrictive, and their distribution licence [povray.org] does not permit any modification at all.
    • POV-Ray has some excellent "GUIs." For example: Moray and Wings3d. You can even use high-profile modelers like Maya and 3ds Max, and then convert the scene files into POV format.

      Although the source code for POV-Ray is available, the POV team does not consider the program to be Open Source, nor does the license.

  • I just got into POVRay (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thrash242 ( 697169 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:54AM (#9418442)
    Apparently I picked an excellent time to look into POVRay, as it was just after 3.6 had been released. In fact the Windows distribution was still buggy and wouldn't install so I had to go with 3.5. It must have been just that day that it was released.

    Anyway, I was at first put-off by the lack of a visual interface ("how the f**k are you supposed to do all that with just text?!?"), but after messing around with Moray (a visual front-end for POV), I determined that I had fewer problems just typing it all in. I think it's my experience programming versus my lack of experience with doing anything in 3D other than a few Quake maps.

    Of course, I'm still limited to doing very basic things, but I'm beginning to understand the power of POV--especially the fact that it's a complete language. I find it amazing that people have written macros that will automatically generate everything from trees to whole cities.
    • Of course, I'm still limited to doing very basic things, but I'm beginning to understand the power of POV--especially the fact that it's a complete language. I find it amazing that people have written macros that will automatically generate everything from trees to whole cities.

      That, really, is the beauty of POV-Ray. I also use various commercial modelers, but when I need (or just want) to do something algorithmically, I turn to POV-Ray. Personally, I find the macro language annoying, so I usually use Per

  • ObIRTC plug (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Scurrilous Knave ( 66691 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:55AM (#9418444) Homepage

    No discussion of the excellent POV-Ray renderer would be complete without a mention of The Internet Ray-Tracing Competition [irtc.org], which is graciously sponsored by a member of the POV-Ray team. While POV-Ray would certainly exist without the IRTC, it is questionable whether the reverse is true.

    On a personal note, I'd like to echo all of the positive comments about POV-Ray. Around 1988, I began writing my own ray-tracer, in Modula-2 of all things. But then I ran across POV-Ray on a BBS, and realized that I'd spend the rest of my life eating their dust and sniffing their butt fumes, so I dropped mine and have never regretted it. POV-Ray stands out among its kin--not perfect by any means, but excellent nevertheless.

  • IRTC (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:02AM (#9418463) Homepage
    Also, for those of you who want to see some examples of some quality (and not so quality) raytracing work, a lot of it down in POV Ray, check out the Internet Ray Tracing Competition over at www.irtc.org [irtc.org].

  • Too little too late.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:06AM (#9418469)
    8 Years ago powray was slow, but quality wise better than most commercial renderers.
    Since then not much has changed with povray, but A LOT with the rest.
    Now povray is still slow as hell (the radiosity core is RIDICULOUS. it takes longer per scanline then others per picture while still having artifacts)

    Look here:
    http://www.pointzero.nl/renderers/
    and find at least 10 other open source renderers that were developed in less time than the povray-tram needed for this half-assed update, are 10 times faster (or 100 times if you use some sort of GI) and feature the ability to render stuff other than their own format (e.g. plugins for blender/3ds/ect).

    • I'm curious, do you have any statistics or evidence to back up your speed claim?

    • Re:Too little too late.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      'Tis the first time I'm here at Slashdot, so please forgive me for using the "Anonymous Coward" Account...

      There are a few things you should notice BEFORE claiming that POV-Ray is slow and especially, "half-assed".

      POV-Ray makes no use of a Graphics Card GPU, but relies solely on the CPU. Why? Because the double-floating point precision isn't supplied on a GPU.

      Why is radiosity faster on commercial apps making use of the scanline-technique? Because their just showing f***ing triangles, which can be rushed t
      • I agree with most of your comments (and your sentiment...don't bash it, its FREE!!! Fix it if you want to gripe about a feature) but no commercial app really uses the GPU in quite the way you ascribe, at least currently. When you render a Maya image, it is being done completely in software. The previews may be being massively accellerated in hardware, but the final image is ALL done in software (unless you have one of those extremely expensive hardware RT boxes...which the typical person doesn't). Now o

  • there is competetion (Score:3, Informative)

    by golgafrincham ( 774723 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @07:38AM (#9418781) Journal
    hm, i'd rather stick with yafray [uniovi.es], it's open source, has a nicer language (ok, depends on taste) and is (somewhat) integrated into blender [blender3d.org]. and the results are simply amazing.

    • Conversely, POV-Ray is more mature and more portable. For example, Yafray required the very most recent point release of GCC when 0.0.6 came out...sigh). Also, POV-Ray comes with documentation (fancy that!).

      • For example, Yafray required the very most recent point release of GCC when 0.0.6 came out...sigh).

        Not only that, they're locked to that specific point release of GCC. (You need something like gcc 3.3.2 to compile; gcc 3.4, for instance, won't cut it.)

        I wanted to give Yafray a try, but to be honest, I'm not about to go through the pain of downgrading gcc just to play with a new raytracer. There's something to be said about excersizing a little restraint in your code so that it's portable.

      • yafray docs (Score:2, Informative)

        by golgafrincham ( 774723 )
        Also, POV-Ray comes with documentation (fancy that!).

        there is documentation, just not on the yafray pages ;) yafray docs [blender.org]

  • A Good Teaching Tool for 3D concepts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rishistar ( 662278 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @08:18AM (#9419024) Homepage

    When I had to teach Computer Graphics (circa POV-Ray 3.1) I found it a great way of getting kids to see how all the concepts involved in 3D computing came into being without having to worry too much about those with weak programming skills. (This was an issue at the place I was teaching at).

    Each type of concept (eg merging primitive objects/translucency etc) can be introduced one at a time into the text script file with instant pretty pictures to look at as output.

    They could also take the program home with them and the nerdier ones could try running it on their linux distros too ;-) This was a huge advantage over any commercial packages.

  • Programmer art (Score:3, Interesting)

    by willm5 ( 592275 ) <will@nospAM.willmcgugan.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @09:05AM (#9419443) Homepage
    I've been using Povray for years. Initialy because it was the only ray-tracer available to me, but later on because I could create high quality images and animations programmaticaly by producing scene files from aplications.

    I like it because I can pretend for a moment that Im an artist, and not a geek. Even though I'm editing what looks like a programming language to the casual observer.

    Currently I'm using it to produce animated alpha channel sprites for a game, and having a ball.

    http://www.pingball.com [pingball.com]

  • GPLed POV-Ray? (Score:3, Informative)

    by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @09:28AM (#9419682) Homepage
    This release concentrates on stability and providing a framework for future re-implementations.

    So... does this mean there's hope for a GPL-ed POV-Ray? IIRC, the main reason why it's distributed under those restrictive terms was that the developers have no means anymore to get in contact with some authors who still have a significant amount of code in there, so they cannot get their OK for a licensing change.

    Are they going to redo those parts now and adopt a more open development model? I'd love that.

  • povray vs maya/max/etc (Score:4, Insightful)

    by capsteve ( 4595 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @10:09AM (#9420077) Homepage Journal
    it's interesting to see comments that pit povray against these other applications which are really intended to put a great amount of creative control at the hands of the user...

    there are some fundamental differences between povray vs maya/max/etc which aren't so apparent but important to distinguish the applications.

    pov models and renders objects based on the mathematical description of the surface. maya/max on the other hand models objects based on triangulating the surface. while it seems esoteric, it is a fundamental difference which really puts these applications into two different classes. try modeling a quaternion fractalor other mathematical shape/function in maya... additionally the complex and random model generation that pov has(onyale's pipe macro, chris colfax macros) is not something easily created with these other apps.

    maya and max on the other hand have a strong UI to help put a layer between the user and the code itself. there's no way you could do the type of modeling in pov that you could in maya. pov is very methodical; plan out the image, heavy previsualization, utilization of macros and includes to manage the items you previously created. maya provides immediate feedback as items are created, providing a more fine art approach of creation, kinda like working with clay as opposed to architecting a building.

    comparing these applications (pov/max/maya) is like comparing a car to a plane... they are both used for transportation, but the mechanisms to implement the main function is vastly different(it's not the best analogy, take it with a grain of salt)...

    perhaps a more productive discussion would be to have some kind of shootout between maya, max, and blender.

  • The Zen of POV-Ray (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gavin Scott ( 15916 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:06PM (#9423616)
    POV is one of the greatest free software programs available, but people usually look at it the wrong way (IMHO).

    What stops people generally is that it has no visual modeling facility. This leads people to believe that it is only good as a renderer where the input is created by some visual modeling tool like Moray, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    While you certainly can use POV as an ordinary backend renderer, the true fun and power of the program comes with hand-written scene description files.

    Yes, hand-written.

    You can accomplish in 20 lines of POV code things that would take hours with a visual modeling interface. It's all about procedural descriptions rather than visual construction. Take some time and look through the many excellent sample scenes that are included, then start out by making small changes to the code and rendering them to see how it looks with your change.

    Most of the best images created with POV were not done using a modeling program but hand written scene descriptions.

    POV is a programming language for scenes the way C is a programming language for computer programs, and it really is a full-blown programming language (though a little unusual in places I will admit).

    While things like modeling complex organic forms (the human body for example) are generally impractical to do procedurally, you can do just about anything else this way, and often much more easily and with more control than you would have positioning a lot of points in space iwth a modeling program.

    And if you have any interest in the more abstract artistic kind of compositions, you can do just amazing things in a single page of POV code. The ability to use conditional and looping stuctures along with macros and functions in your scene description gives you amazing power.

    And as far as GUIs go, at least POV for Windows has one of the best designed and most functional GUI interfaces that I've used. It's not a modeler, but as an interface to the POV renderer and even as a general purpose code editor it is superb.

    One of POV's best uses (and most overlooked ones) is as an introductory programming environment for children. You can quickly show a child a program that creates 100 reflective transparent randomly colored spheres randomply positioned, and then show them how to change one or another of the parameters that control the apperance or number of spheres, and they can iteratively experiment with changes and rendering their results.

    It's simple programming with a visual payoff.

    G.

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