Learn POVRay

This fairly simple scene took 1h 53min to render. Seriously, I’d have to get a better computer to do some serious POV-Ray stuff…

Since the fastest computer in my house is a 1.8ghz computer with 1GB or 2GB of DDR RAM, which i have 3 of, I am going to build a povray cluster using pvm or mpi cluster communication. This should cut rendering time down by 25% with the three computers. At least I hope so…

I’ll poke at POVRay as the urge strikes me, but learning it isn’t a priority. There are too many other cool things I want to do.

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 fell in love with POV nearly 12 years ago on a 386. I still use iot nearly every day, especially on my lappy on long train journies. It’s harder work than most other rendering systems, but infinatly more satisfying.

Putting together my pov notes, and I decided to make a little Ruby script which listed out all the available colors in colors.inc. This is already available in the portfolio. I even used the same pov source code. So, basically, it’s useless. But hey, I got to practice using Ruby for some basic shell scripting tasks.

Oh, right … the link