Learn POVRay

Today I thought of making nifty 3-D charts with POV-Ray. It should be simple to write the macros for scaling and what not, so I just need to throw a datafile at it and render!

After that I just need to work on texturing my space scene, and I think I’ll have to move on to “Master POV-Ray”

I tweaked my planet to have much better blending of colors and normals, and it looks much, much better.

I moved two ships roughly into position on the screen. The foreground one needs to be a bit smaller, and it needs a bit more activity, like some containers being attached by tugs or something.

I’m going to work on the planet next to make it more realistic, perhaps a variation of the cloud technique for surface features will give more realism.

Here’s an update on my space scene. I’ve rewritten it to use my new moon (which looks great!) and scaled everything realistically.

I think I’m going to convert it to be planet-centric rather than sun-centric, because the sun-centric model makes positioning harder. Soon I’m going to add a spaceship in the foreground covering the bottom right, and rotate the camera a little less because my menu bar hides half the moon.

By accident, I found the following color map makes a good moon coloring:

pigment {
  bozo
  turbulence .8
  color_map {
    [0.0 color White filter 1]
    [0.1 color White]
    [0.6 color White filter 1]
  }
}

I used it like this to make a moon:

#include "colors.inc" #macro Moon2()
sphere { 0, 1
  pigment {
    bozo
    turbulence .8
    color_map {
      [0.0 color White filter 1]
      [0.1 color White ]
      [0.6 color White filter 1]
    }
  }
}
#endcamera { location x*5 look_at x*15 angle 15 }
object { Moon2() translate x*15 scale 5 }light_source { 0 color White }

I made these robots to play with CSG and the Macro features of POV-Ray.

Last night I played with texturing using an example from the manual (sections 2.3.4.1 and 2.3.4.2) and did some CSG/macro work to generate the above scene.

The cargo ship still needs to be textured, and I’d like to get a yellow/black checkered look on the bands around the cargo cylinders, but so far I haven’t been able to figure out to get the checkered pattern to project onto a cylinder.

The backbone of the ship was made with translations of 4 7-unit long thin boxes with cross-members and cross-braces rotated and translated into position.

One of the things that hung me up was that the order of the translate and rotate commands matter. I suppose this means that you can do multiple rotations, translations and scalings on an object…

I’d like to do something with the central spars of the ship in the foreground, but I haven’t decided what. One problem with the image is that it is artificially posed so I’ll have to reposition things to more correct relative locations, probably with some drawing to get the feel right. (The ship in the foreground is longer than the diameter of the large planet in the background.)

The scene above is sized for my monitor (8:5 aspect ratio). I haven’t tried rendering it with a 4:3 camera yet.

This weekend I got through the first five sections of the POVRay tutorial. I’m getting the ideas on how to build objects with CSG (build them around <0,0,0>, then translate), and how the lighting works.

Next up is the camera.

I’ve always wanted to make cool rendered things with POVRay.