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POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)
- icf80 2y agothis is old as me play it with a long time ago ~20 years
- falcor84 2y agoWould you mind sharing some detail?
- Aardwolf 2y agoWhile I can't know what the parent-parent post meant, POV Ray is around for over 30 years and was popular in the early 2000's on the internet as well, and is fun to play around with, I remember people posting renderings on forums like gamedev.net etc...
- deepakg 2y agoAlso reminded me of the internet ray tracing competition https://www.irtc.org/ https://www.irtc.org/ where many submissions would’ve been produced using POV Ray.
- schoen 2y agoI really appreciate seeing things that are named after the Internet as part of the exuberance of being able to do or share them on a worldwide network. Naming something after the Internet itself is probably most common in the 1990s.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bobim 2y agoParticiped once, and ranked low... I could only dream about the skill level of our french master Mr Tran.
- Nekorosu 2y agoIt's 29 years for me. It's my first 3D rendering software.
- secretsatan 2y agoMe too, oof
- CodeCompost 2y agoIt's been a long time since I have looked at POV ray and my knowledge of it is woefully out of date, but does POV ray currently make use of hardware acceleration or is it still CPU bound?
- defrost 2y agoBy their FAQ: CPU, FPU, Bus speed, and Memory bound - in decreasing order of relevance. Will POV-Ray render faster if I buy the latest and fastest 3D videocard? 3D-cards are not designed for raytracing. They read polygon meshes and then scanline-render them. Scanline rendering has very little, if anything, to do with raytracing. 3D-cards can't calculate typical features of raytracing as reflections etc. The algorithms used in 3D-cards have nothing to do with raytracing. Does POV-Ray support 3DNow for faster rendering? No, and most likely never will. https://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:Miscellaneous https://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:Miscellaneous POV-Ray 3.7.0 (released 6 November 2013) is the current official version for all platforms. There are significant internal changes in this version due to the introduction of SMP support. https://www.povray.org/download/ https://www.povray.org/download/
- jb1991 2y ago> 3D-cards are not designed for raytracing. That's a rather old statement. Nvidia and Apple GPUs have hardware-accelerated raytracing now. But even without specific raytracing features, lots of renderers use GPU compute for some of the raytracing workflow.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- defrost 2y agoIt dates back to 2013. I've merely quoted what the POX-Ray site has to say about it's own capabilities and beliefs at the time of writing.
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- CiaranMcNulty 2y agoI played with this a lot during my degree back in 97-99. A friend used it to render her final year project. Amazing to see it's still going!
- susam 2y agoAbout 11 years ago, after having written a tiny ray tracer from scratch using Java, I taught myself some ray tracing with POV-Ray. My goal was to learn a few POV-Ray features each day over 25 days and render some interesting scenes that exercise those features. I began with simple spheres and cubes and gradually progressed to more intricate shapes and textures. Here are the results: https://github.com/susam/pov25 https://github.com/susam/pov25 The source code is in the "src/" directory. The rendered images are included in the README (scroll down to see them). I hope you like them!
- cl3misch 2y agoI find the kaleidoscope surprisingly cool. In hindsight it's obvious but to get this out of a raytracer is somewhat unexpected to me. https://github.com/susam/pov25#Kaleidoscope https://github.com/susam/pov25#Kaleidoscope
- kbr2000 2y agoCool indeed. A spin on it (also using POV-Ray), but using a photo (texture on an object) and animated (rotating that object, the texture, or the mirrors -- I forgot) in [0] and [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJaBspDXgzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJaBspDXgzs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc5uEwwr6S8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc5uEwwr6S8
- mytailorisrich 2y agoIt ran on Atari ST and I remember I had to let it run all night to get fancy reflective spheres in all their 320x200 glory.
- pjmlp 2y agoBack in the 90's we had to leave our computers running all night, to get nice images out of POV-Ray, this brings back some memories.
- jpalomaki 2y agoWe wrote some small tools with Turbo Pascal to generate number of scene files, then rendered these to create small animations. Having a camera move over a reflective chessboard was pretty amazing.
- vergessenmir 2y agoShowing my age here but povray is what got me into software engineering. I wrote a raytracer in Pascal + Assembly and then in C and ASM This was in 1995.
- sumtechguy 2y agoHaving to write one for a class in college made me a master of pointers and C. Arrays within arrays rendering to Z buffers and crude matrix operators. Now all built into a nice lib and 3 calls away.
- ABS 2y agoI still remember when I used to leave my 386 sx 25Mhz running all night to render very simple scenes with POV-Ray (somehow sleeping through the loud fan noise!). And the extreme excitement the day I upgraded to a 486 dx 33/66 Mhz which, thanks to the math co-processor, rendered those same scenes in (10s of) minutes instead!!
- LoganDark 2y ago> somehow sleeping through the loud fan noise Sometimes white noise helps with sleep, so this may not be that big of a surprise.
- ABS 2y agoyes, but that wasn't white noise I assure you :-D
- p_l 2y agoEspecially if there was classic IDE HDD grinding involved :D
- amlib 2y agoI loved that deep scratchy bass, modern hard drives are so quiet... I miss sleeping to my computer defragging all night long :(
- doubled112 2y agoNot all modern drives. One of mine goes "thunk thunk thunk". I could hear it from rooms away in one case I had it in.
- blacklion 2y agoI've had 24x7 FIDO node in my room for years. I've silenced modem pulse dialing by replacing relay with expensive one. I've silenced CPU cooler by using 90mm 12v fans connected to 5v (yes, in 486DX era). But HDD was unbeatable. On the other hand, if I wake up in the middle of the night due to HDD grinding, I was sure that I have new mail (echoareas) to read!
- rffn 2y agoAh, the memories. First DKB Trace, then the newly renamed POV-Ray. Left the computer on for hours to get tiny pictures. Adding a 387 was a huge step forward; IIRC approximately a 10x speedup.
- kqr 2y agoMany years ago I asked one of my role models how he had made some pre-rendered sprites for a game, and he told me it was with POV-Ray, but that he did not recommend it because it used its scripting language to define scenes, which he was concerned would be too complicated for someone who has not done 3D work before. I have only done 3D work as a waxing and waning hobby, but then, and to this day, the POV-Ray scripting interface seems like one of the more natural ways to define a scene to me.
- prideout 2y agoI created all the sprites to my game, "Noop's Odyssey", using POV-Ray. My game was one of the games on a "100 Shareware Games" CD-ROMs.
- masswerk 2y agoHere are some game characters, I did with POV-Ray, and it was great for such things! https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze-FamilyPortrait.html https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze-FamilyPortrait.ht... (See the link at the bottom for the game, yet another Pac-Man clone. Mind that pixels where still bigger, then.)
- sztanko 2y agoAre there any modern alternatives to POV-Ray?
- dagw 2y agoDepends what you mean? If you want a modern high performance ray tracer with support for all the latest hardware and implementing all the cutting edge ray tracing research, there is Embree and OptiX. They don't however come with their own scene description language, which is what made POV-Ray so popular in the first place.
- sztanko 2y agoI was thinking for some python (or similar language) api for Ray tracer that doesn't have a steep learning curve and is easy to use.
- kristianp 2y agohttps://mitsuba.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html https://mitsuba.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html There seems to exist python front ends to embree. How good this one is, I don't know.
- zokier 2y agoOpenUSD is probably the closest thing in terms of scene description? You have both Python Api and human-readable ascii format
- _pferreir_ 2y agoDoesn't Blender's main rendering engine, Cycles, sort of use ray tracing (path tracing, I believe)?
- jlarocco 2y agoWhat's wrong with using POV-Ray?
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- usrusr 2y agoThe POV-ray syntax with its wild mix of curly and whitespace state description driven by a C-preprocessor lookalike successfully primed my mind for making the jump from Basic and Pascal to C (and eventually to other curly languages). Eternally grateful, also to the IRTC that made me spend enough time with the syntax to have a strong learning effect.
- opentokix 2y agoIt's been a minute since I heard pov-ray mentioned :D - Had fun playing around with it in the early 2000s
- mobiuscog 2y agoI think it was in 1994 that I posted to usenet (lost in time), offering 'render time' on my 286 for POV-Ray. They were such amazing times, yet compared to today seem so innocent. POV-Ray was my main hobby at the time, along with the community of the Raytech BBS in the UK, and defined so much of my interests going forward, through many 3D modelling and rendering packages. Such a huge part of my younger years, and one of the biggest influences on my life overall.
- alexisread 2y agoA lot of people do similar with 3D printing now (esp. over COVID to print PPE), so there is a glimmer of this time :) Time to offer a real-world POV-Ray printing service? ;)
- vertnerd 2y agoI really liked the scripting language for defining 3D scenes; I bet today you could have an interactive UI that shows the scene in real-time as you modify the script. The last scene I rendered, about 14 years ago, was a picture of the NIST national standard for pi: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiggerntatie/pivis/master/studies/pivis-ultra-enhanced-public.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiggerntatie/pivis/master/...
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoCan you explain what that pi thing is for?
- jasomill 2y agoI think it's a joke. The arbitrarily accurate power series approximation of pi (4 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + ⋯) predates NIST (and the US).
- vertnerd 2y agoIt is a joke or a riddle, depending on your point of view. I used to be a high school math/science teacher, so this fits in at the intersection of those. If we have national standards for physical things like length, or mass, why not a national standard for a mathematical constant? It's just a ring with a scale on it that measures the circumference. Every now and then, a technician checks the value and records what they see in the log. Even my fellow teachers struggled to grasp the humor of the thing. I suppose I'm a little strange.
- maweki 2y ago10 years ago I implemented a brainfuck interpreter that had as output an animated povray scene description with a visualisation of the brainfuck abstract machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIZTFrkl0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIZTFrkl0w
- Keyframe 2y agobro...
- tverrbjelke 2y agoNeat video. With some subtext to explain what the different "subthings" are for in brainfuck to stage and then do become "multiply" would make it even more "bro!"ish :-) I also spotted your openxcom play from 6 years ago and must confess that I am playing it these days!
- Keyframe 2y agoMemories! POV vs Vivid flame wars. I think it were amongst first adventures in gfx on PC I had, outside of SGI and Amiga.
- m-i-l 2y agoIn 1991 or 1992 I used POV-Ray on my Atari ST to create some title screens for some home videos. Completely gratuitous marble text infront of a glass ball on top of water type of stuff, which took all night to render, but it was fun, and crucially free. For years I'd looked enviously at Cyber Studio for the Atari ST, with its StereoTek liquid crystal shutter 3D glasses add-on, but it was just too expensive for me at the time. Then in 1996 or 1997 I thought it would be fun to use it in a professional context at the software company I worked at, making a 3D animated GIF version of one of the product logos which I put on the web site (FWIW it looks like the 3D non-animated version is still visible on the Internet Archive Way Back Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/19971211003918/http://www.sophos.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19971211003918/http://www.sophos... 27 years later). Although no-one had asked for it, I was still in effect getting paid to do something I used to do for fun, which felt good.
- contingencies 2y agoIf you once enjoyed POV, check out OpenSCAD. It's quite similar in terms of CSG concepts and primitive animation capability, but more useful for getting actual mechanical design work done. https://openscad.org/ https://openscad.org/
- nanoxide 2y agoMy first ever contact with programming back in 8th grade some 20 years ago. My then-teacher's website about PoV-Ray is still online, in all its late 90s goodness (in German): http://asti.vistecprivat.de/index.html http://asti.vistecprivat.de/index.html
- animal531 2y agoProbably 25 or so years ago I created my first render ever, in POV-Ray of a LEGO character's head using a hypercube. I only had a ruler to use for measurements of the head shape and the face and it took me quite a while, but it came out better than any other LEGO render I ever saw during that time. I was quite proud of it for such a simple thing.
- lordfrito 2y agoBricklink Studio 2.0 lets you build and render Lego models using POV-Ray [1]. Looks as amazing as it sounds [1] https://studiohelp.bricklink.com/hc/en-us/articles/6506022103447-POV-Ray https://studiohelp.bricklink.com/hc/en-us/articles/650602210...
- chadcmulligan 2y agoUsed to use this and moray to make "cool" 3d graphics for clients around the early 2000's, such fun edit: moray is available on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20220331032107/http://www.stmuc.com/moray/medown.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220331032107/http://www.stmuc....
- dayjah 2y agoAble to share any of the “cool”? I feel like a hit of nostalgia rn.
- chadcmulligan 2y agolong gone unfortunately, though not that fancy, just made some text in moray and applied some materials, in a semi transparent box or sphere, render. The reaction was always wow, I always chuckled at the time.
- doubloon 2y agoThis is what I thought the internet wiuld become, back in the 1990s, just tons of projects like Povray. Not addeictive dark pattern trillionaires, see the recent Eli Gray article posted on HN how big tech enables link fraud for example. This was before FAANG existed as it does now. Apple was a struggling PC maker and Microsoft was the evil empire being challenged by a Finnish college student. Sun and SGI and DEC were big tech and they made you know… actual tech. It was this crazy dream that it would last like that forever, that the internet would just be one huge BBS of Povray style people, makers and users, who were interested in art and science above all else. Nobody was thinking you could contract third parties of poor people to screen out death videos on your BBS so they would have PTSD but you could make billions. Nobody was thinking to clickfarm children.
- katzenversteher 2y agoVery well said. I miss the early days of the internet. In addition: Event though the net was not very safe at the time (no/poor encryption, no much monitoring by officials etc.) it kind of felt differently. Many users where at least aware of the dangers of speaking with strangers and downloading things but today it's somehow of more deceiving. It looks nice and shiny on the outside but full of traps. Maybe because the 90s web was less "shiny" on the outside, it was less deceiving?
- goeiedaggoeie 2y agoAs I have aged (almost 50 now) I have realised that greed will turn any good thing dark without vigilance, and then who watches the watchers. Eternal spring perpetually. A culture which prioritises individual profits over the commons will destroy anything not regulated. As I have said before on this forum, we need a way to price in the whole lifecycle of manufacturing through to waste and punishments for behaviour like Purdue and the opioid crisis should be the loss of all wealth generated by such dark behaviour. of course this is also unworkable, but I am not personally certain what is workable without a secular moral revolution.
- wcerfgba 2y agoOr we could move away from pricing everything and the neoliberal obsession to turn everything into a market, and restructure our economy to provide everyone with their basic material needs, regardless of how much income they have.
- DragonMaus 2y agoI spent so many hours with POV-Ray when I was younger, rendering LEGO models I had made with MLCAD. Some of those renders even found their way into a project I did in school for CAD class.
- josefdlange 2y agoNostalgia unlocked...
- steve1977 2y agoTo add some anecdote, I remember doing a short animation with a Star Wars A-Wing Fighter (the model for which I downloaded, not made myself). I added light sources in the engines for that "glow" effect. Unfortunately, I messed up some of the geometry in the animation, so while the A-Wing was rolling to one side, the two lights were rolling to the other side ;) Which I of course only found out after a day or so, as renders were so slow (and this was something the size of a poststamp...)
- amenghra 2y agoI love the hall of fame (https://hof.povray.org/ https://hof.povray.org/), with https://hof.povray.org/Riemann_Sphere-Isosurface.html https://hof.povray.org/Riemann_Sphere-Isosurface.html being my favorite. If someone made a simple povray => stl converter, I would get that one 3d printed.
- no_news_is 2y agohttps://grabcad.com/library/m-c-escher-sphere-spirals-1 https://grabcad.com/library/m-c-escher-sphere-spirals-1
- david_p 2y agoI was 12 in 1996, in southern France, and my art teacher held a lunch-time club to teach us 3D modelling. We were using MNM (midnight modeler) and POVRay to create some cool 3D models on my schools 386 computers. I was dreaming of, one day, working at ILM. Good memories :)
- mscharrer 2y agoSome POV-Ray art I created years ago: https://mscharrer.net/povray/scenes/ https://mscharrer.net/povray/scenes/ Source code is always included.
- dicroce 2y agoDamn, I remember finding POVray on BBS's in the pre internet days. So cool that they have kept it going all this time.
- KqAmJQ7 2y agoThis is very old but imo very interesting index of pov-ray stuff by various artists. https://www.f-lohmueller.de/links/index_re.htm https://www.f-lohmueller.de/links/index_re.htm
- geon 2y agoPovray and the Internet Raytracing Competition was my entire world in the late 90s. https://www.irtc.org/stills/ https://www.irtc.org/stills/
- angst_ridden 2y agoSame here! And yet the only time I placed it was for an image I'd created in Strata Studio-Pro.
- indyjo 2y agoWhile POV-Ray was a cool project, let's not forget how far we have come with Blender and what a great success for the Free Software movement it represents.
- dagw 2y agoWhat I'm kind of missing with Blender and the likes is the procedural 'magic' and surprise of POV-Ray. How just typing a few lines of 'code' into a text file could produce wondrous and mind blowing images, and then just changing a couple of numbers would give you an entirely different and unexpected result. Blender makes it infinitely easier to get exactly the result you want, but sometimes that not what you actually want.
- eggy 2y agoI was one of the original donors in June 2202, iirc, for Ton to buy Blender and start the Blender Foundation. I used birthday money and sent I think, $50, that's why I remember it to this day. I still use Blender, but I was using it back then to generate 3D reliefs to carve on my self-built 4x8 foot CNC router table. I wrote a script based on a shape-from-shading algorithm originally developed by NASA to get more out of all of the single-lens B&W satellite photos they had. My company was The Wooden Image. To the other poster: you could do procedural stuff in Blender early on using Python scripting, although I was using POV-Ray very early on.
- anthk 2y agoPOV-Ray was free too since a few versions.
- weinzierl 2y agoMark Shuttleworth used it to render Reach for the stars on the ISS in 2002. For me, POV-Ray and FractInt were the first real programs I read and understood. They were my C tutors. Also, you've probably been raytracing too much if you're in this thread. And you probably know who David K. Buck is.
- BerthaDouglas34 2y ago[dead]
- lizknope 2y agoMy roommate in 1992 would run this on his 386DX with the 387 math coprocessor. It would take literally days to run to create a small 640x480 image. This was in the days of DOS where you could only run one program at a time. It would run all night and then in the morning he would stop it so he could use the computer for other things. But he had some kind of Targa .tga file utility to merge the files together. Then he compiled povray for our Sun workstations and he would split up the rendering so that each machine would render 50 lines of the image and he could merge them together with that utility. I remember how happy he was that he could render stuff 20 times faster.
- koolala 2y agoPOV: PLY Author
- Something1234 2y agoI love POV-Ray. I learned about it in college when I was trying to find things to do on my gaming desktop that weren’t gaming. It’s so much fun to mess with and make different things with. There’s some super impressive examples and stitching the images together is a lot like magic. It’s honestly really satisfying to use. I imagine a lot of people can use it. I made dice with it already. https://www.henryschmale.org/2022/02/22/povray-dice.html https://www.henryschmale.org/2022/02/22/povray-dice.html
- tantalor 2y ago> things to do on my gaming desktop that weren’t gaming This is such a funny statement. What a strange perspective.
- fidotron 2y agoPovray clearly holds a special place for many of us. For me it was the first use (via slow dial up) to access HENSA (higher ed national software archive) in the uk for public domain software, and this by itself was mind blowing, in between dealing with my mother keeping picking the other phone up and dropping the connection. The batch processing tools of that era for graphics were qualitatively different from the real time interactive editors. There is something to be said for the imperfect serendipity that would result. The closest thing these days, oddly, is ML training, where part of the appeal is the sense the computer is working super hard for you. Were you to recreate the same concepts on modern hardware you would do something like SDF CSG on GPUs, but it would be surprisingly interactive and so missing this surprise element.
- hooby 2y agoI remember playing around with that like... 20 to 25-ish years ago. Back then only pre-rendered cut-scenes could come close to having graphics like that, and I dreamed of the day when games actually look like that realtime. Kinda ironic that now that games actually do look like that (if not even better), I prefer to play retro pixel-art indie games, which actually put their focus on gameplay instead of graphics.
- anthk 2y ago>Do look like that Eeeeeeh... some advanced scenes with crazy complex lightning are still unmatched even from Unreal 5.
- codazoda 2y agoI cut my teeth on POV-Ray. It hasn't been updated in some time but being able to code scenes has a lot of advantages. For product design I use OpenSCAD. Maybe POV-Ray made this style of design popular. A couple weeks ago I decided to use Blender for some 3D print modeling. I needed to make a wheel cap for my son, who had broken his. Although I love Blender I was disappointed when I wanted to update some things later in the design phase. Blender has some destructive editing that caused me grief. Perhaps you could avoid this with some additional mastery of the tool.
- prox 2y agoThere are tools like Fluent that help a lot : https://blendermarket.com/products/fluent https://blendermarket.com/products/fluent The programmer is really cool and responsive on his Discord
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jgarzik 2y agoDKBTrace and POV-Ray were my introduction to CGI. Open source meant it was possible for an Average Person with No Budget to do CGI animations and stills.
- ecliptik 2y agoPOV-Ray was my first introduction to HPC clusters. In the early aughts a few of us in college participated in a summer program at Wright Patterson Air-force Base to build a MPIPOV [1] cluster out of 10 old Sun SPARCStation 20s with "Happy Meal" NICs. We documented the process of installing Linux (Debian), configuring the network, compiling MPIPOV from source and clustering them together. It was a thing of beauty to watch the rendering speeds increase and the blinkenlights putting on a show in that lab when we were done. If I remember correctly they planned to take what we documented and use for a much larger cluster they were building, but never found out the specifics. 1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648136.748781 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648136.748781
- pragma_x 2y ago32+ years and still kicking. Simplicity at it's best: all you need is a text editor and lots of CPU time.
- benterix 2y agoAh sweet 1990s... I remember tinkering with POV-ray and then discovering Blue Moon Rendering Tools - it felt like magic!
- benwerd 2y agoHonestly delighted that this still exists. Like others, I used to leave my computer running overnight to render. Dating myself, but it was a big deal in the BBS scene in the UK in the early nineties - so many files and techniques being swapped.
- cadr 2y agoI remember including something I rendered in POV-Ray on one of my college applications in the mid-90s.
- MentallyRetired 2y agoRight? seeing the name brought back a rush of memories. I had no idea it was still around.
- usefulcat 2y agoI remember being in college in the 90s when the school got a bunch of new HP workstations for the lab. perl + povray + rsh = distributed rendering!
- jwells89 2y agoI think I remember playing with POV-Ray (along with Yafaray) as alternative renderers for Blender back in the early 2000s, not long after Blender had been ported to OS X. At that point I had been making simple scenes in Blender for a while but had grown tired of the limitations of its internal renderer, most notably its inability to render caustics and bounced light, and so was trying my luck with other renderers. Never did get that far with either. If I recall, the problem with POV-Ray was getting the Blender file translated correctly for POV-Ray to render right, and while Yafray didn’t have the translation issue it was too slow to practically use on my little 400Mhz iMac G3. It never even crossed my mind back then to directly write code for POV-Ray. At that point, in my teenage mind 3D was something you did with GUI software packages like Strata 3D and Blender.
- chaoticmass 2y agoThere was a POV ray render of a McIntosh tube amp that I used to show people and nobody knew it was computer generated.
- chaoticmass 2y agohttps://hof.povray.org/images/mcintoshhdri3.jpg https://hof.povray.org/images/mcintoshhdri3.jpg
- jandrese 2y agoWow, POV-Ray, what a blast from the past. I thought it might be fun to see how fast a scene renders today vs. back in the 90s with my Pentium-75, but apparently they've decided to integrate Boost so it takes forever to compile. Edit: My old scripts are no longer compatible. :( Edit2: The -MV option is your friend. :) Yeah, modern machines are fast. Trace Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0.126 seconds) I seem to recall this render taking a couple of minutes on my old machine.
- jpitz 2y agoI spent a lot of time with POV-Ray. Back in ~1992 I had the IBM C++ Compiler for OS/2 and spent a day or so tweaking the source to get it to compile. Fun times.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoHow does POVRay compare to Cycles?
- Synaesthesia 2y agoPovray is 30 year old tech, Cycles runs on a GPU, its way more advanced.
- thomashabets2 2y agoI'm rendering Quake Done Quick (a Quake 1 demo) using POV-Ray. It's not fast. :-) https://blog.habets.se/2015/03/Raytracing-Quake-demos.html https://blog.habets.se/2015/03/Raytracing-Quake-demos.html and qpov.retrofitta.se Here's an earlier video from before I added level texture mapping support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85pVYyK2uA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85pVYyK2uA
- RobRivera 2y agoPovRay, now thats a name I have not heard in quite some time
- 29athrowaway 2y agoChatGPT is absurdly bad at POVRay.
- r24y 2y agoThis is an amazing project and I'm glad it exists. My college capstone project was building a 3d scanner, and we were able to use POV-Ray to create a repeatable test environment for our algorithms. Wish I had an excuse to play around with it nowadays.
- fgdelcueto 2y agoAs many here, I spent too much time with POVRay in my youth. About 8 years ago I decided to try an idea that I had in my mind and decided to install it and relearn it. I wanted to try this fractal idea made of toruses. It's a 9000px image, so I uploaded it here https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/beecf8383ac249978d943b88a80f36b6 https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/beecf8383ac249978d943b8... where you can zoom in to see the detail. I remember being excited every month to see what people would do in the raytracing competition. Good times :D http://www.povray.org/competition/ http://www.povray.org/competition/
- ggm 2y agoI did my modelling in radiance, an architectural lighting/illumination framework. it used a very "unixy" text file format to specify objects as functions in xyz space. Overall I thin POV-Ray overtook it. Going from 512x512 to 1024x1024 was a quadratic explosion in time to render in radiance. Never worked out why.
- berniedurfee 2y agoI used to play with this probably around when it first came out. I’d sit in my dad’s office at IBM and use his all powerful PC-AT steel full tower PC. It was so cool to even render simple stuff back then. Amazing to see this project still around.