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Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer
make realistic 3-D computer generated pictures
The following is from the well written and copious User's Manual
for Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer. It is a fine and
accurate description of the program so I will let the
program speak for itself.
The Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray-Tracer creates three-dimensional,
photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray-
tracing. It reads in a text file containing information
describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an
image of that scene from the view point of a camera also
described in the text file. Ray-tracing is not a fast process by
any means, but it produces very high quality images with
realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects.
Ray-tracing is a rendering technique that calculates an image of
a scene by simulating the way rays of light travel in the real
world...The user specifies the location of the camera, light sources, and objects
as well as the surface texture properties of objects, their
interiors (if transparent) and any atmospheric media such as fog,
haze, or fire.
The POV-Ray (tm) package includes detailed instructions on using the
ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are included
with POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when
you get the package. These scenes can be modified so you don't
have to start from scratch.
In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large library of pre-
defined shapes and materials is provided. You can include these
shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including the
library file name at the top of your scene file, and by using the
shape or material name in your scene.
Here are some highlights of POV-Ray's features:
* 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).
* 15 and 24 bit color display on many computer platforms using
appropriate hardware.
* Create landscapes using smoothed height fields.
* Many camera types, including perspective, panorama,
orthographic, fisheye, etc.
* Spotlights, cylindrical lights and area lights for
sophisticated lighting.
* 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, triangles and planes.
* Advanced shape primitives such as ... Torii (donuts), bezier
patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics, smooth
triangles, text, fractals, superquadrics, surfaces of
revolution, prisms, polygons, lathes and fractals.
* 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.
* 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 (not available on
all platforms).
* Halt and save a render part way through, and continue
rendering the halted partial render later.
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