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Free Multiplatform raytracing with POV-Ray

Author: Gunnstein Lye

Publishing date: 20.11.2001 19:42

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or POV-Ray among friends, is a high-quality freeware tool for rendering photorealistic three-dimensional graphics. This is a "getting-started" tutorial for those completely unfamiliar with POV-Ray.

Warm Up

POV-Ray is not free as in free speech, but free as in free beer, meaning that it is not open source but freely available. Still, the source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports. Check out the license if you are curious.

As an example of the top-quality output that POV-Ray is capable of, check out the Internet Raytracing Competition (IRTC), particularly Warm Up (rendered with a POV derivative) and First Strike at Pearl. You can see thumbnails of these images on this page, click the links at the bottom of this page for the full version.

First Strike at Pearl

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of raytracing, check this link: What is Ray Tracing? Basically, raytracing is a way of creating photorealistic images of an imaginary world by calculating how light rays travel from a light source, reflect on objects and hit a camera. This is computationally intensive work, and complex scenes may take hours or even days to render. Your first scenes will only take a few seconds, though.

POV-Ray in its original form is not a modeler, like 3D Studio Max or LightWave. (There are, however, many different modelers available for POV-Ray.) You use a special scene description language that is similar in syntax to C/C++, to place your light sources, objects and camera. Because of this it has a steep learning curve, but in return it is extremely flexible.

POV-Ray is available in official versions for Windows 95/98/NT, DOS, the Macintosh, i86 Linux, SunOS, and Amiga. Download a version for your favorite OS from www.povray.org. Refer to the download for installation instructions. The rest of this article assumes that you have installed POV-Ray. The examples show how to run it on a Unix system, but the scene files are valid on all platforms supported by POV-Ray.

Warm Up: Link to original image
First Strike at Pearl: Link to original image

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Comment List

Topic:	Author:	Time:
Intro to POV	Dr M	15.05.2005 06:19
So many website talk about POV; but this is the first time, I learnt how to use POV and that too in 15 minutes. Keep up the good work. I am in Silly-Con valley, where clear explanations are hard to find.
Great Article!	John Holden	17.02.2002 16:03
This has been a really informative article. Although it isn't in-depth, it's perfect for a beginner like me. Thanks for putting it up here! John
sp. origin	Vik Olliver	24.11.2001 04:48
Are we meant to proofread here? It's origin, not origo. Vik :v)
RE: sp. origin	Gunnstein Lye	26.11.2001 13:16
> Are we meant to proofread here? > It's origin, not origo. I'm not a native english speaker, but my dictionary states that the word "origo" can be used when speaking of coordinate systems. But I'll change it if "origin" is more commonly used or more correct. Gunnstein