I enjoy diving into POV-Ray these days. It's a fun way to get away from GUI-driven work I might do in other 3D software.<p>One cool thing about the experience of using POV is that you can scroll in one dimension and see the entire organization of elements that will become a sensory window into the imagination. If you can learn the syntax and options, you can effectively break down what would otherwise be many different sets of interfaces and gain an enhanced feeling of accessibility.<p>If you combine this with an appreciation for abstraction-focused scene modeling, you can reach this point of really amazing emotion where you realize you can create or model _anything_ with the provided tools, as long as you can embrace the need for abstraction as its own sort of user-mindset technology.<p>The closest analog that comes to mind outside of 3D would be MacPaint, MS Paint, Grafx2...if you've ever seen someone seriously plan their home garden or design a home theater in one of those apps, and then build the damn thing in real life, you may know what I'm talking about.<p>Outside of that...maybe something like watching a concept designer use a bic crystal pen to sketch out an entire world on newsprint.<p>With POV-Ray I find myself honing in on something like an intuitive feel for how much abstraction to employ to simply and effectively depict what I want to depict, given any time constraints. It's really cool to reach that point no matter the tool. I'm sure a lot of people feel similar feelings about their favorite programming tools as well.
Hi got into ray tracing back in the early 1990s as a teenager. The community back then was very small and we all had ridiculously horrible computers. But it was still a lot of fun and I remember doing cool things such as adding a fog command to the ray tracer, which taught me a lot about programming.<p>For some reason, it’s just really captivating to build a scene using declarative code, rather than doing so visually in an editor like Blender.
I was just telling my son about POV-Ray yesterday, since he's starting to learn to use Blender and I dabbled with POV-Ray as a teen. I'm quite impressed that it's still being actively developed 30 years later.
I work on robotic space missions and we have an old janky tool that does modelling of lunar insolation for upcoming lunar rover missions (for solar panel insolation, prediction of ice, etc). It was with an odd mix of horror and delight that I looked under the hood and found POV-Ray. I played with POV-ray as a teenager (30s now) and was amazed to see it still in use.
i made this using pov ray
<a href="https://youtu.be/E6RGjxUOI68" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/E6RGjxUOI68</a><p>i like using code instead of a gui for some 3d stuff
The amount of comments comparing POV-Ray to Blender is really puzzling to me. The comparison is apples to oranges.<p>In fact you could (and probably still can) use POV-Ray to render your Blender scene. Blender is not a renderer - it just ships with some integrated ones and integrations for various external ones.
This is pretty off-topic but I've been trying, very unsuccessfully, to port POV-Ray to WASM as a very low-priority side project for a while now. Of course there are better, more web-native tools to build ray tracers with but I really like the POV-Ray SDL and would love to play around with it in the browser.<p>It might be misguided but the ffmpeg builds in WASM made me think it might be possible but I reached the end of Google/SO trying to get the Boost libs to link while running emconfigure with the existing codebase.<p>I'm totally winging it so if someone has any ideas that could set me on the right path it would be greatly appreciated.
Happy memories. I grew up with POVRAY.EXE in the 90s.<p>I had no idea, back then, just how much impact the process of thinking in CSG would have on my nascent mind.<p>A truly great piece of software for a wain cutting their teeth with math and programmatic construction.
POV-Ray has a powerful set of solid geometry operations and is quite good for generating scene descriptions from another program and then invoking PV to render.<p>Obviously it's command line rather than a visual tool.
My computer graphics class used pov ray back in early 2000s. I remember I wrote a Perl script to generate my scenes to avoid typing things manually. I still may have the code somewhere.
POV-Ray was so awesome when a friend from work and I were playing around with it from the CD-ROM source code included with the book. I think it was the texture generation capabilities that was the most fascinating parts for me. Rendering then as now was super slow, as is always the case because we want the best we can get on hardware of the day so we only raise expectations and pay in render times.
As a joke I once wanted to post a ray traced image per day, except the images were actually real photographs of things composed and lit to look like it was a ray traced scene. I still wonder if anyone would have noticed, and how.
Interesting it is still around, I knew a couple of people during the 1990's that were deep into it.<p>Alongside using Enlightenment as their window manager.<p>It was always cool to check their desktops.
Not to hate on the job done here. But I think most people today (or even back in 2013) could have gotten further with Blender from an artistic perspective.<p>Blender 2.4 was kind of terrible to use from an animation perspective, but the controls for simple objects / cycles rendering was never really that difficult IMO. The key was having the knowledge to stay on the "nice parts" of Blender.<p>Blender 2.6 and 3.0 these days have made great strides at being easier to use from an animation and rigging perspective.<p>------<p>The harsh shadow lines could be made easier if you used area-lamps (in Blender) for example. They probably exist in POV-ray, but a 3d GUI to move-and-place these objects around grossly simplifies the effort, compared to placing the objects around with a text-based format like POV-Ray.