POV-Ray
POV-Ray is a full-featured ray tracer. Ray tracers
simulate
objects and light sources of the real world to calculate
photorealistic, computer generated images. Because of the nature of ray
tracing, this process is quite CPU-intensive, at the benefit of more
realistic images compared to real time rendering techniques. For
example, in POV-Ray, you can model a glass prism, and you will see a
spectrum in the resulting image.
POV-Ray by itself is a command-line utility that will take
scene descriptions, written in a special easy-to-understand language,
to produce ray-traced images (or even a sequence of images, for
animations). You can either write those scene-descriptions by hand, or
use external tools to generate (parts of) the scene.
Features include:
- Easy to use scene description language
- Large library of stunning example scene files
- Standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors
and textures
- Very high quality output image files (up to 48-bit color)
- 16 and 24 bit color display on many computer platforms
using appropriate hardware
- Create landscapes using smoothed height fields
- Many camera types, including perspective, orthographic,
fisheye, etc
- Spotlights, cylindrical lights and area lights for
sophisticated lighting
- Photons for realistic, reflected and refracted, caustics.
Photons also interact with media
- Phong and specular highlighting for more realistic-looking
surfaces
- Inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity) for more realistic
lighting
- Atmospheric effects like atmosphere, ground-fog and
rainbow
- Particle media to model effects like clouds, dust, fire
and steam
- Several image file output formats including Targa, PNG and
PPM
- Basic shape primitives such as spheres, boxes, quadrics,
cylinders, cones, triangle and planes
- Advanced shape primitives such as Tori (donuts), bezier
patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics, smooth triangles,
text, superquadrics, surfaces of revolution, prisms, polygons, lathes,
fractals, isosurfaces and the parametric object
- Shapes can easily be combined to create new complex shapes
using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray supports unions,
merges, intersections and differences.
- Objects are assigned materials called textures (a texture
describes the coloring and surface properties of a shape) and interior
properties such as index of refraction and particle media (formerly
known as "halos")
- Built-in color and normal patterns: Agate, Bozo, Bumps,
Checker, Crackle, Dents, Granite, Gradient, Hexagon, Leopard, Mandel,
Marble, Onion, Quilted, Ripples, Spotted, Spiral, Radial, Waves, Wood,
Wrinkles and image file mapping. Or build your own pattern using
functions
- Users can create their own textures or use pre-defined
textures such as ... Brass, Chrome, Copper, Gold, Silver, Stone, Wood
- Combine textures using layering of semi-transparent
textures or tiles of textures or material map files
- Display preview of image while rendering
- Halt and save a render part way through, and continue
rendering the halted partial render later
- SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support
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Last Updated Saturday, February 25 2012 @ 02:38 AM EST
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