About 11 years ago, after having written a tiny ray tracer from scratch using Java, I taught myself some ray tracing with POV-Ray. My goal was to learn a few POV-Ray features each day over 25 days and render some interesting scenes that exercise those features.<p>I began with simple spheres and cubes and gradually progressed to more intricate shapes and textures. Here are the results:<p><a href="https://github.com/susam/pov25">https://github.com/susam/pov25</a><p>The source code is in the "src/" directory. The rendered images are included in the README (scroll down to see them). I hope you like them!
I still remember when I used to leave my 386 sx 25Mhz running all night to render very simple scenes with POV-Ray (somehow sleeping through the loud fan noise!).<p>And the extreme excitement the day I upgraded to a 486 dx 33/66 Mhz which, thanks to the math co-processor, rendered those same scenes in (10s of) minutes instead!!
My roommate in 1992 would run this on his 386DX with the 387 math coprocessor. It would take literally days to run to create a small 640x480 image.<p>This was in the days of DOS where you could only run one program at a time. It would run all night and then in the morning he would stop it so he could use the computer for other things. But he had some kind of Targa .tga file utility to merge the files together.<p>Then he compiled povray for our Sun workstations and he would split up the rendering so that each machine would render 50 lines of the image and he could merge them together with that utility.<p>I remember how happy he was that he could render stuff 20 times faster.
10 years ago I implemented a brainfuck interpreter that had as output an animated povray scene description with a visualisation of the brainfuck abstract machine. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIZTFrkl0w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIZTFrkl0w</a>
I love POV-Ray. I learned about it in college when I was trying to find things to do on my gaming desktop that weren’t gaming. It’s so much fun to mess with and make different things with. There’s some super impressive examples and stitching the images together is a lot like magic.<p>It’s honestly really satisfying to use.<p>I imagine a lot of people can use it. I made dice with it already.<p><a href="https://www.henryschmale.org/2022/02/22/povray-dice.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.henryschmale.org/2022/02/22/povray-dice.html</a>
Many years ago I asked one of my role models how he had made some pre-rendered sprites for a game, and he told me it was with POV-Ray, but that he did not recommend it because it used its scripting language to define scenes, which he was concerned would be too complicated for someone who has not done 3D work before.<p>I have only done 3D work as a waxing and waning hobby, but then, and to this day, the POV-Ray scripting interface seems like one of the more natural ways to define a scene to me.
In 1991 or 1992 I used POV-Ray on my Atari ST to create some title screens for some home videos. Completely gratuitous marble text infront of a glass ball on top of water type of stuff, which took all night to render, but it was fun, and crucially free. For years I'd looked enviously at Cyber Studio for the Atari ST, with its StereoTek liquid crystal shutter 3D glasses add-on, but it was just too expensive for me at the time.<p>Then in 1996 or 1997 I thought it would be fun to use it in a professional context at the software company I worked at, making a 3D animated GIF version of one of the product logos which I put on the web site (FWIW it looks like the 3D non-animated version is still visible on the Internet Archive Way Back Machine at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19971211003918/http://www.sophos.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19971211003918/http://www.sophos...</a> 27 years later). Although no-one had asked for it, I was still in effect getting paid to do something I used to do for fun, which felt good.
I really liked the scripting language for defining 3D scenes; I bet today you could have an interactive UI that shows the scene in real-time as you modify the script.<p>The last scene I rendered, about 14 years ago, was a picture of the NIST national standard for pi: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiggerntatie/pivis/master/studies/pivis-ultra-enhanced-public.png" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiggerntatie/pivis/master/...</a>
Povray and the Internet Raytracing Competition was my entire world in the late 90s.<p><a href="https://www.irtc.org/stills/" rel="nofollow">https://www.irtc.org/stills/</a>
I love the hall of fame (<a href="https://hof.povray.org/" rel="nofollow">https://hof.povray.org/</a>), with <a href="https://hof.povray.org/Riemann_Sphere-Isosurface.html" rel="nofollow">https://hof.povray.org/Riemann_Sphere-Isosurface.html</a> being my favorite. If someone made a simple povray => stl converter, I would get that one 3d printed.
If you once enjoyed POV, check out OpenSCAD. It's quite similar in terms of CSG concepts and primitive animation capability, but more useful for getting actual mechanical design work done. <a href="https://openscad.org/" rel="nofollow">https://openscad.org/</a>
Some POV-Ray art I created years ago: <a href="https://mscharrer.net/povray/scenes/" rel="nofollow">https://mscharrer.net/povray/scenes/</a>
Source code is always included.
Mark Shuttleworth used it to render <i>Reach for the stars</i> on the ISS in 2002.<p>For me, POV-Ray and FractInt were the first real programs I read and understood. They were my C tutors.<p>Also, you've probably been raytracing too much if you're in this thread. And you probably know who David K. Buck is.
While POV-Ray was a cool project, let's not forget how far we have come with Blender and what a great success for the Free Software movement it represents.
POV-Ray was my first introduction to HPC clusters. In the early aughts a few of us in college participated in a summer program at Wright Patterson Air-force Base to build a MPIPOV [1] cluster out of 10 old Sun SPARCStation 20s with "Happy Meal" NICs.<p>We documented the process of installing Linux (Debian), configuring the network, compiling MPIPOV from source and clustering them together.<p>It was a thing of beauty to watch the rendering speeds increase and the blinkenlights putting on a show in that lab when we were done.<p>If I remember correctly they planned to take what we documented and use for a much larger cluster they were building, but never found out the specifics.<p>1. <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648136.748781" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648136.748781</a>
I think it was in 1994 that I posted to usenet (lost in time), offering 'render time' on my 286 for POV-Ray. They were such amazing times, yet compared to today seem so innocent.<p>POV-Ray was my main hobby at the time, along with the community of the Raytech BBS in the UK, and defined so much of my interests going forward, through many 3D modelling and rendering packages.<p>Such a huge part of my younger years, and one of the biggest influences on my life overall.
This is very old but imo very interesting index of pov-ray stuff by various artists.<p><a href="https://www.f-lohmueller.de/links/index_re.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.f-lohmueller.de/links/index_re.htm</a>
Showing my age here but povray is what got me into software engineering. I wrote a raytracer in Pascal + Assembly and then in C and ASM<p>This was in 1995.
Here are some game characters, I did with POV-Ray, and it was great for such things!<p><a href="https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze-FamilyPortrait.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze-FamilyPortrait.ht...</a><p>(See the link at the bottom for the game, yet another Pac-Man clone. Mind that pixels where still bigger, then.)
Povray clearly holds a special place for many of us. For me it was the first use (via slow dial up) to access HENSA (higher ed national software archive) in the uk for public domain software, and this by itself was mind blowing, in between dealing with my mother keeping picking the other phone up and dropping the connection.<p>The batch processing tools of that era for graphics were qualitatively different from the real time interactive editors. There is something to be said for the imperfect serendipity that would result. The closest thing these days, oddly, is ML training, where part of the appeal is the sense the computer is working super hard for you. Were you to recreate the same concepts on modern hardware you would do something like SDF CSG on GPUs, but it would be surprisingly interactive and so missing this surprise element.
As many here, I spent too much time with POVRay in my youth. About 8 years ago I decided to try an idea that I had in my mind and decided to install it and relearn it. I wanted to try this fractal idea made of toruses.<p>It's a 9000px image, so I uploaded it here
<a href="https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/beecf8383ac249978d943b88a80f36b6" rel="nofollow">https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/beecf8383ac249978d943b8...</a>
where you can zoom in to see the detail.<p>I remember being excited every month to see what people would do in the raytracing competition. Good times :D
<a href="http://www.povray.org/competition/" rel="nofollow">http://www.povray.org/competition/</a>
Ah, the memories. First DKB Trace, then the newly renamed POV-Ray.<p>Left the computer on for hours to get tiny pictures.<p>Adding a 387 was a huge step forward; IIRC approximately a 10x speedup.
I cut my teeth on POV-Ray. It hasn't been updated in some time but being able to code scenes has a lot of advantages.<p>For product design I use OpenSCAD. Maybe POV-Ray made this style of design popular.<p>A couple weeks ago I decided to use Blender for some 3D print modeling. I needed to make a wheel cap for my son, who had broken his. Although I love Blender I was disappointed when I wanted to update some things later in the design phase. Blender has some destructive editing that caused me grief. Perhaps you could avoid this with some additional mastery of the tool.
I'm rendering Quake Done Quick (a Quake 1 demo) using POV-Ray. It's not fast. :-)<p><a href="https://blog.habets.se/2015/03/Raytracing-Quake-demos.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.habets.se/2015/03/Raytracing-Quake-demos.html</a> and qpov.retrofitta.se<p>Here's an earlier video from before I added level texture mapping support: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85pVYyK2uA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85pVYyK2uA</a>
It's been a long time since I have looked at POV ray and my knowledge of it is woefully out of date, but does POV ray currently make use of hardware acceleration or is it still CPU bound?
To add some anecdote, I remember doing a short animation with a Star Wars A-Wing Fighter (the model for which I downloaded, not made myself). I added light sources in the engines for that "glow" effect.<p>Unfortunately, I messed up some of the geometry in the animation, so while the A-Wing was rolling to one side, the two lights were rolling to the other side ;)<p>Which I of course only found out after a day or so, as renders were so slow (and this was something the size of a poststamp...)
Used to use this and moray to make "cool" 3d graphics for clients around the early 2000's, such fun<p>edit: moray is available on the wayback machine <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220331032107/http://www.stmuc.com/moray/medown.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220331032107/http://www.stmuc....</a>
Probably 25 or so years ago I created my first render ever, in POV-Ray of a LEGO character's head using a hypercube.<p>I only had a ruler to use for measurements of the head shape and the face and it took me quite a while, but it came out better than any other LEGO render I ever saw during that time. I was quite proud of it for such a simple thing.
I think I remember playing with POV-Ray (along with Yafaray) as alternative renderers for Blender back in the early 2000s, not long after Blender had been ported to OS X. At that point I had been making simple scenes in Blender for a while but had grown tired of the limitations of its internal renderer, most notably its inability to render caustics and bounced light, and so was trying my luck with other renderers.<p>Never did get that far with either. If I recall, the problem with POV-Ray was getting the Blender file translated correctly for POV-Ray to render right, and while Yafray didn’t have the translation issue it was too slow to practically use on my little 400Mhz iMac G3.<p>It never even crossed my mind back then to directly write code for POV-Ray. At that point, in my teenage mind 3D was something you did with GUI software packages like Strata 3D and Blender.
My first ever contact with programming back in 8th grade some 20 years ago. My then-teacher's website about PoV-Ray is still online, in all its late 90s goodness (in German): <a href="http://asti.vistecprivat.de/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://asti.vistecprivat.de/index.html</a>
I was 12 in 1996, in southern France, and my art teacher held a lunch-time club to teach us 3D modelling.<p>We were using MNM (midnight modeler) and POVRay to create some cool 3D models on my schools 386 computers.<p>I was dreaming of, one day, working at ILM.
Good memories :)
I remember playing around with that like... 20 to 25-ish years ago.<p>Back then only pre-rendered cut-scenes could come close to having graphics like that, and I dreamed of the day when games actually look like that realtime.<p>Kinda ironic that now that games actually do look like that (if not even better), I prefer to play retro pixel-art indie games, which actually put their focus on gameplay instead of graphics.
DKBTrace and POV-Ray were my introduction to CGI.<p>Open source meant it was possible for an Average Person with No Budget to do CGI animations and stills.
The POV-ray syntax with its wild mix of curly and whitespace state description driven by a C-preprocessor lookalike successfully primed my mind for making the jump from Basic and Pascal to C (and eventually to other curly languages). Eternally grateful, also to the IRTC that made me spend enough time with the syntax to have a strong learning effect.
I did my modelling in radiance, an architectural lighting/illumination framework. it used a very "unixy" text file format to specify objects as functions in xyz space.<p>Overall I thin POV-Ray overtook it.<p>Going from 512x512 to 1024x1024 was a quadratic explosion in time to render in radiance. Never worked out why.
This is an amazing project and I'm glad it exists. My college capstone project was building a 3d scanner, and we were able to use POV-Ray to create a repeatable test environment for our algorithms. Wish I had an excuse to play around with it nowadays.
I used to play with this probably around when it first came out.<p>I’d sit in my dad’s office at IBM and use his all powerful PC-AT steel full tower PC.<p>It was so cool to even render simple stuff back then. Amazing to see this project still around.
Wow, POV-Ray, what a blast from the past. I thought it might be fun to see how fast a scene renders today vs. back in the 90s with my Pentium-75, but apparently they've decided to integrate Boost so it takes forever to compile.<p>Edit: My old scripts are no longer compatible. :(<p>Edit2: The -MV option is your friend. :)<p>Yeah, modern machines are fast.
Trace Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0.126 seconds)<p>I seem to recall this render taking a couple of minutes on my old machine.
I spent so many hours with POV-Ray when I was younger, rendering LEGO models I had made with MLCAD.<p>Some of those renders even found their way into a project I did in school for CAD class.
I spent a lot of time with POV-Ray. Back in ~1992 I had the IBM C++ Compiler for OS/2 and spent a day or so tweaking the source to get it to compile. Fun times.
Honestly delighted that this still exists. Like others, I used to leave my computer running overnight to render. Dating myself, but it was a big deal in the BBS scene in the UK in the early nineties - so many files and techniques being swapped.
This is what I thought the internet wiuld become, back in the 1990s, just tons of projects like Povray. Not addeictive dark pattern trillionaires, see the recent Eli Gray article posted on HN how big tech enables link fraud for example. This was before FAANG existed as it does now. Apple was a struggling PC maker and Microsoft was the evil empire being challenged by a Finnish college student. Sun and SGI and DEC were big tech and they made you know… actual tech. It was this crazy dream that it would last like that forever, that the internet would just be one huge BBS of Povray style people, makers and users, who were interested in art and science above all else. Nobody was thinking you could contract third parties of poor people to screen out death videos on your BBS so they would have PTSD but you could make billions. Nobody was thinking to clickfarm children.