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POV-Ray

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The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows 95/98/NT, DOS, the Macintosh, i86 Linux, SunOS, and Amiga. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.

Unfortunately, this quote (which I leave for nostalgic reasons) is by now slightly outdated. Since version 3.5 there are official binaries only for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. The older versions, however, are still available from the FTP server.

Nevertheless POV-Ray is a highlight of open source software and one of the best raytracers available. It is not GPL but has a, in many aspects very different, license of its own.

• Official Homepage
• POV-Ray questions and tips
• POV-Ray resources, tutorials and links on Sascha Ledinsky's homepage.
• The Internet Ray Tracing Competition is closely connected with POV-Ray, though you can, of course, use any renderer to participate. Check out "Gladiators" among the animations for 2000, it is my favorite. You can buy a CD collection with all the winners.
• The goals of the POV-Ray Book Project are
  • To collect raytracing tutorials from all over the Web into a central location.
  • To provide a resource for beginner and experienced raytracers to share information.
  • To use the collected information to publish a basic book on POV-Ray 3.x.
  • To promote and publicize POV-Ray as a great raytracing program.
  Last updated 2002-02-24.

Tools and Add-Ons

• Discontinuity is a tool to help make animations with POV-Ray.

  POV-Ray, a powerful tool for making stunning 3D graphics, has always had the capability of creating animations. However, the process was always combersome and difficult. In an effort to make it easier, I started writing a keyframe-based program to ease the process.

• PoseRay converts, manipulates and previews Wavefront (OBJ), 3D studio (3DS) and AutoCAD (DXF) files. It can convert the meshes into POV-Ray code or Moray UDO models. It can also act as a geometry transform, materials editor and displacement map tool. Import of lights, camera and materials from Poser 4 files is also supported.
• ClothRay is a patched version of POV-Ray, which allows to do cloth simulation. The cloth is rectangular, and interacts with its environement (gravity, some objects lying, wind…).
• Vahur Krouverk is the author of POVMan, a patch which allows use of the RenderMan shading language for creating custom pigments.
• MegaPOV is a collection of unofficial extensions of POV-Ray.
• Moray is a shareware wireframe modeller for POV-Ray 3.x (Windows, EUR 80). You can order the IRTC CDs here, too.
• Forester is a complete 3D landscape generation and visualisation tool. It creates scene description files that are rendered using POV-Ray. Forester uses the Terragen terrain file format. An additional tool, arboretum, creates 3D models of trees in astonishing detail. Shareware, $35. Site requires JavaScript.
• Steve Anger has written some programs for POV-Ray, for example 3DS2POV, which converts 3DS-files to POV-files.

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Last modified 2004-03-16