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… 4 years ago

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… 6 years ago

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. 6 years ago

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” 7 years ago

I tweaked my planet to have much better blending of colors and normals, and it looks much, much better. 7 years ago

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. 7 years ago

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. 7 years ago

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. 7 years ago

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 link8 years ago

Gotta say, best documentation I’ve seen included with the app since Perl. You know, not counting those distros that don’t like to include the perldocs with perl by default. Freaks.

Here’s the latest vaguely interesting picture. It’s just the lighting demo, so anybody who has already worked through the intro will be quite bored. The rest of you can see what sort of things I get to create in POV right away. 8 years ago

I made these robots to play with CSG and the Macro features of POV-Ray. 8 years ago

Not sure if this is worth it or not. It takes sooo long to write a simple script. Oh well. And it takes a long time learning before you can make really cool POV models. 8 years ago

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. 8 years ago

I’ve messed with Pov-Ray in the past. Much love for the venerable old program, but I got impatient with the programmatic interface. I eventually defected to Art of Illusion, but more power to you! 8 years ago

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. 8 years ago

I’ve always wanted to make cool rendered things with POVRay. 8 years ago