Persistence of Vision is FREE Ray Tracing Software, available for download from http://www.povray.org/
| Page Contents | |
| What
is Raytracing? What is POV-Ray? |
Why's this page here? |
|
Chris' Ray
Tracing Page | |
You simply specify the shape and positions of objects, lights and the camera. The software does the rest. The rest being - working out where the rays of light go and what they bounce off before going into the camera lens. The software generates a 'photograph' of what the 'camera lens' 'sees'.
Different Ray Tracing software can handle different effects, but typically you can define
Many Ray Tracing products come packaged with modelling software which allows you to create, size and position objects, lights and the camera. Modellers do not use the Ray Tracing engine to display the scene while you are working on it, as Ray Tracing takes a lot of computer power to generate a single image. Modellers therefore display using wireframe or using a simpler form of rendering until you are ready to see the finished image.
The POV software takes an ASCII text file as input. This file contains
definitions of all objects within the scene, their surfaces and such additional
items as camera position and lighting. As output it generates a graphics bitmap
image of the scene from the viewpoint of the camera.
Scene files can be
generated using any text editor if you are prepared to learn the POV Scene
description language. For simple scenes the file is not difficult to create by
hand.
On the other hand, if you feel more comfortable with a nice graphical
user interface there are a great many Freeware, Shareware and commercial
products available to help generate POV-Ray scene files for the different
operating systems.
Different modellers can be used to generate different types of scene including buildings, landscapes, trees, machines etc. The output from different modellers can often be combined to good effect, e.g. using the output from a fractal landcape generator to provide a backdrop to a building.
In addition there are many sample scene files available on the Web and many newsgroup contributors willing to share their experience.
The official site for all matters concerning POV-Ray is http://www.povray.org/
This site enables me to store away binary files, source files and images to make them available to those who wish to use them.