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Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
- nikodunk 6y agoI love POV ray so much. It's what originally got me into programming in the late 90s/early 2000s. Found out about it from a PlayStation 1 Magazine.
- philsnow 6y agoMy interest in POVRay helped me in my high school math classes: I was really into making animations in POVRay and at the time I was in calculus and it really made parametric equations "click" for me.
- Macuyiko 6y agoIt holds a special place in my heart as well. In 2002, my parents gave me a book "Multitool Linux" [1] which wasn't a spectacularly well received one, containing a mix of wildly different topics, but this was exactly what I needed as a teen experimenting with Linux for the first time. One of the chapters was about POV-Ray, and I remember being amazed with this newly-discovered canvas. I spend hours looking at images others had created and wondering how they'd pulled it off. I think I never got much further than rendering small animations on my (if I recall correctly) 400Mhz pc. Good times. (As an aside, I'd completely forgotten the title of the book, although vaguely remembering the cover and time frame. It's so hard to find older stuff using Google when only having some vague descriptions. I found it by remembering that I read a book review years later and after some digging around could locate the review back to https://www.linux.com/news/book-review-multitool-linux/ https://www.linux.com/news/book-review-multitool-linux/ based on the style of writing, which I remembered. I must have read that book to pieces. The chapter using Wireshark was also amazing to me.) [1] https://books.google.be/books?id=g0CPF6MEFcUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.be/books?id=g0CPF6MEFcUC&printsec=front...
- erjiang 6y agoWow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating light through a scene. Old-school raytracing cannot know how light indirectly bounces off a wall, for example, leading to artificial-looking shadows and flat lighting. Anyways, anyone interested in making neat little 3D scenes like in this GitHub should try out Blender - it's shockingly easy to make realistic renders compared to several years ago. Edit: Blender's Cycles rendering engine seems to have been included with Blender since 2011. POV-Ray probably represents 2000s-era tech, although I think it can do more than what's demonstrated in this post.
- selfsimilar 6y agoI agree the quality of the render engine is much better with physical rendering, but I still love constructive solid geometry and the ideal of pure curves to define the scene geometry. All these meshes with their triangles! Whatever happened to using NURBS or metaballs or other non-polygonal modeling?
- BubRoss 6y agoPolygons can be smoother and subdivided efficiently at render time without artifacts, which is how they are used now. Nurbs and other curved surface representations end up with huge problems pragmatically when it comes to tools, workflow, visualization, texture coordinates, keeping the surfaces together etc. The list is long. Polygons are very simple in all these areas and can be made smooth at render time so you get the best of both worlds. If you were in a production situation it wouldn't be long before you gave up these ideals.
- TylerE 6y agoThat’s the beauty of CSG though... it’s volumetric, not surface based
- selfsimilar 6y agoI credit POV-Ray with getting me into programming in the early 90s. A fascination with computer graphics led to Fractint, POV-Ray, and dreams of someday being able to play Kai's Powertools and SGI machines. I think I even had a subscription to some black and white POV-ray zine. Can't remember what it was called though.
- jordache 6y agohow is POVRay used in modern workflows these days? It's extremely counter intuitive to articulate a 3d scene in code. Maybe for some applications, exactness in the 3d scene via code is useful.
- elihu 6y agoAs far as I know, it's not. The turing-complete scene description language and the many ways of representing geometry that makes POV-Ray so powerful and fun to use also makes it very difficult to interoperate with other tools. POV-Ray is mostly used by hobbyists, students, and people who need to visualize some data and need a tool that can be easily scripted for their needs.
- trevortheblack 6y agoIf anyone is interested in getting started on Ray Tracing _today_. I recommend Peter Shirley's _Ray Tracing In One Weekend_ Series. https://raytracing.github.io/ https://raytracing.github.io/ (I edited the later editions)
- s800 6y agoAnother recommendation: DKBtrace, which is a predecessor to Povray, has easier to grok code. IMHO.
- packetslave 6y agoalso Jamis Buck's "The Ray Tracer Challenge"
- grep_it 6y agoReal Time Rendering maintains a list of high quality free resources including "Ray Tracing: In One Weekend" http://www.realtimerendering.com/#intro http://www.realtimerendering.com/#intro
- thefifthelf 6y agoI entered some of those irtc comps. Povray appealed to the programmer and the artist in me. Writing algorithms (macros) in povray to create trees or place raindrops made you really look into how nature works. It's a challenge that requires a certain mindset.
- ujeezy 6y agoI got into POV-Ray in the late 90s when I wanted 3D graphics for my Geocities page. I was in over my head in every dimension (scripting, math, artistic ability), but it was incredibly rewarding, and the newsgroup gave me a very positive early impression of what a community can feel like on the internet.
- klodolph 6y agoI loved POV-Ray in the 1990s and early 2000s. The thing is—it’s ridiculous to try and make something remotely complicated or organic with POV-Ray, unless you are using some modeling program that can export to POV-Ray format. POV-Ray scenes were dominated by procedural textures and geometric primitives, for the most part. The rendering engine was very strong, and supported all sorts of features like area lighting, depth of field, motion blur, global illumination, caustics, volumetric lighting, etc. All of these were supported way back in the day before they became more common in other engines, and of course, using these features made your render times horrific back on early-2000s single-CPU machines. The way a lot of us did modeling in POV-Ray was with a pencil and some graph paper. Without a good modeling program, you were setting yourself up for a ton of work. So I’d try to get the most out of simple models, and make it look as good as possible with lighting. Funny enough, if you are used to CSG then you may need some time to adapt to modern workflows. Blender supports CSG, of course, but there are some caveats that you should pay attention to.
- gedy 6y agoI really loved this aspect of POV-Ray back then. As a "normal" programmer it was really nice to be able to script very complex scenes procedurally. E.g. https://vimeo.com/105317159 https://vimeo.com/105317159
- CrLf 6y agoPOV-Ray was my introduction to programming, before actual programming. Graph paper and a lot of trial and error. My longest render was 50 hours for a single 640x480 image, with caustics and area lighting. 50 hours of a Pentium 100 MHz buzzing near my bed.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoPOV-Ray was the reason that I wanted a 486 DX back in the mid-90's, and not a puny FPU-less 486 SX like my friends had. I didn't do much with it, ultimately, but I really enjoyed noodling around w/ POV-Ray. Rendering a bunch of TGA files and then stringing them together into an animated GIF (or was it an FLC?) was a major exercise. I recall 15 y/o me trying to explain it to the "oldster" who my father purchased the PC from (a guy who was probably in his late 30s). "No-- there's no camera. It's a virtual camera that I place in code for the scene. UGH! You don't understand!" (To be fair, this was a guy who mainly sold PCs and accounting software and wrote code for dBase/Clipper...)
- Synaesthesia 6y agoLol I made really great FLC files of those 4D fractals, Quarternions, which you could animate by changing the parameters. Good times
- gorgoiler 6y ago(Edit: oh wow, it’s really heartening to read how POVRay has such a positive impact on so many others as well, almost 30 years ago!) There is a special place in my heart for POVray. After BBC Basic, it was the first coding I ever did all the way back in ‘94. The thrill of changing an object from opaque to glass, and the anticipation of watching the ray scan grind to a treacle-like pace as it passed over any glass objects. Happier times, simpler times! May it live forever.
- beagle3 6y agoI printed the source code of POV-Ray in 1989 when it was still called DKBTrace (named after its' author, David Kirk Buck) and studied it carefully over a few weeks. It was my introduction to the underlying implementation of (then) modern OO - Turbo C++ 1.0 was released in 1990. It was also my introduction to CSG. Ah, the nostalgia. Thanks, David, and the entire POVRay team.
- ur-whale 6y agoThis has not aged well. Modern OpenSource renders like e.g. luxcorerender produce way more realistic images: https://luxcorerender.org/gallery/ https://luxcorerender.org/gallery/
- weinzierl 6y agoThis is a bit off-topic but I really love POV-Ray and I think it is a fun fact people reading this thread might like: POV-Ray was actually run in space by none less than Mark Shuttleworth when he was on the ISS in 2002. [1] http://www.povray.org/posters/ http://www.povray.org/posters/
- oceanghost 6y agoMy lord, had no idea POV-ray was still around. POV-Ray and Fractint inspired years of asembley graphics programming when I was a teenager...
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoPovray has a nasty problem though - it cannot generate scenes from stdin. The file has to be on the disk.
- brandonmenc 6y agoAfter BASIC, POV-Ray was the next programming language I learned. Lots of fond memories.