8 ms·

I 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 ar

I 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 7y ago
I 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 7y ago
POV-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.
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  Pentium? Pentium! We were lucky to have half a 486 and even then it were powered by ferrets, wi’owt e’en DX floating point coprocessor to its name.
  - W-Stool 7y ago
    Monty Python voice: "You were lucky!"
  - phkahler 7y ago
    >> Pentium? Pentium! We were lucky to have half a 486 I used to run it on DEC Alpha. I wrote a pair of scripts to generate include files of parameters and then render frames of an animation using those parameters. I had to hack POVRAY itself to output .tga files which I then fed to Dave's Targa Animator. A modest 20-30 frame animation took over night on that Alpha. University resources ya know...
- holoduke 7y ago
  How long would it take now on a modern machine? :) 5 , 10min?
  - dan-robertson 7y ago
    Pentiums weren’t that old. It would depend a lot on gpu rather than cpu.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      POVray doesn’t use gpu. It is embarrassingly parallel though. I would expect say a 2000x speedup over a Penguin 1 though. Say, 40x the raw clock x 2-3x more per cycle x 12-16 cores
      - 0-_-0 7y ago
        Those 1st generation Penguins were slow, not even a flight coprocessor
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Less than that even, since in the old days there was likely lots of swapping. A machine of that vintage was likely only on 4mb of RAM. Just the frame buffer would eat up about half of that
  - elihu 7y ago
    If you ran exactly the same code on a modern machine I'd say that's a pretty reasonable guess. You'd get a big speedup just by going from single-threaded to multi-threaded execution. Probably the biggest boost would be to use modern methods. It's possible to do path tracing at interactive frame-rates on modern hardware; some of the optimizations can include not doing very many samples per pixel but to rely on denoising algorithms that can take advantage of the redundancy inherent in the image to smooth out the graininess of course global illumination effects. There are a lot of other algorithmic improvements too; modern acceleration structures, techniques to preferentially sample rays that are most likely to impact the final result, etc.. POV-Ray is amazing software, but it wasn't really ever meant to be an interactive renderer. It kind of leans towards maximum extensibility over raw performance. Modern renderers are usually much faster.
elihu 7y ago
The other side of that is that there are certain kinds of recursive organic structures that are very hard to make with a modeling tool, but can procedurally generated with a little bit of code. Making realistic trees is hard, but I've made cartoonishly-plausible trees in POV-Ray without much effort. (Define a level-0 tree as a leaf attached to a twig; i.e. a flattened sphere stuck onto a tapered cylinder. Define a level N tree as two level N-1 trees transformed and rotated to project from the end of a branch.) Making a plausible human face with just a text editor, on the other hand, I wouldn't know where to start.

gedy 7y ago

I 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 7y ago

POV-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.

gorgoiler 7y ago
Pentium? Pentium! We were lucky to have half a 486 and even then it were powered by ferrets, wi’owt e’en DX floating point coprocessor to its name.
- W-Stool 7y ago
  Monty Python voice: "You were lucky!"
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> Pentium? Pentium! We were lucky to have half a 486 I used to run it on DEC Alpha. I wrote a pair of scripts to generate include files of parameters and then render frames of an animation using those parameters. I had to hack POVRAY itself to output .tga files which I then fed to Dave's Targa Animator. A modest 20-30 frame animation took over night on that Alpha. University resources ya know...
holoduke 7y ago
How long would it take now on a modern machine? :) 5 , 10min?
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  Pentiums weren’t that old. It would depend a lot on gpu rather than cpu.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    POVray doesn’t use gpu. It is embarrassingly parallel though. I would expect say a 2000x speedup over a Penguin 1 though. Say, 40x the raw clock x 2-3x more per cycle x 12-16 cores
    - 0-_-0 7y ago
      Those 1st generation Penguins were slow, not even a flight coprocessor
- TylerE 7y ago
  Less than that even, since in the old days there was likely lots of swapping. A machine of that vintage was likely only on 4mb of RAM. Just the frame buffer would eat up about half of that
- elihu 7y ago
  If you ran exactly the same code on a modern machine I'd say that's a pretty reasonable guess. You'd get a big speedup just by going from single-threaded to multi-threaded execution. Probably the biggest boost would be to use modern methods. It's possible to do path tracing at interactive frame-rates on modern hardware; some of the optimizations can include not doing very many samples per pixel but to rely on denoising algorithms that can take advantage of the redundancy inherent in the image to smooth out the graininess of course global illumination effects. There are a lot of other algorithmic improvements too; modern acceleration structures, techniques to preferentially sample rays that are most likely to impact the final result, etc.. POV-Ray is amazing software, but it wasn't really ever meant to be an interactive renderer. It kind of leans towards maximum extensibility over raw performance. Modern renderers are usually much faster.

elihu 7y ago

The other side of that is that there are certain kinds of recursive organic structures that are very hard to make with a modeling tool, but can procedurally generated with a little bit of code. Making realistic trees is hard, but I've made cartoonishly-plausible trees in POV-Ray without much effort. (Define a level-0 tree as a leaf attached to a twig; i.e. a flattened sphere stuck onto a tapered cylinder. Define a level N tree as two level N-1 trees transformed and rotated to project from the end of a branch.) Making a plausible human face with just a text editor, on the other hand, I wouldn't know where to start.