Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
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Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#2I love POV ray so much. It's what originally got me into programming in the late 90s/early 2000s. Found out about it from a PlayStation 1 Magazine.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#3Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically.
Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now.
The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating light through a scene. Old-school raytracing cannot know how light indirectly bounces off a wall, for example, leading to artificial-looking shadows and flat lighting.
Anyways, anyone interested in making neat little 3D scenes like in this GitHub should try out Blender - it's shockingly easy to make realistic renders compared to several years ago.
Edit: Blender's Cycles rendering engine seems to have been included with Blender since 2011. POV-Ray probably represents 2000s-era tech, although I think it can do more than what's demonstrated in this post.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#4I credit POV-Ray with getting me into programming in the early 90s. A fascination with computer graphics led to Fractint, POV-Ray, and dreams of someday being able to play Kai's Powertools and SGI machines. I think I even had a subscription to some black and white POV-ray zine. Can't remember what it was called though.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#5Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating li…
I agree the quality of the render engine is much better with physical rendering, but I still love constructive solid geometry and the ideal of pure curves to define the scene geometry. All these meshes with their triangles! Whatever happened to using NURBS or metaballs or other non-polygonal modeling?
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#6Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating li…
That's rather unfair to POV-Ray. These are hardly representative of what it's capable of.
Look through the old IRTC archives, for instance: http://ftp.irtc.org/stills/index.html
People were doing stuff like this (http://oz.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/1999-04-30/13hystri.jpg) in 1999.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#7Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating li…
I agree the quality of the render engine is much better with physical rendering, but I still love constructive solid geometry and the ideal of pure curves to define the scene geometry. All these meshes with their triangles! Whatever happened to using NURBS or metaballs or other non-polygonal modeling?
Polygons can be smoother and subdivided efficiently at render time without artifacts, which is how they are used now. Nurbs and other curved surface representations end up with huge problems pragmatically when it comes to tools, workflow, visualization, texture coordinates, keeping the surfaces together etc. The list is long. Polygons are very simple in all these areas and can be made smooth at render time so you get the best of both worlds. If you were in a production situation it wouldn't be long before you gave up these ideals.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree the quality of the render engine is much better with physical rendering, but I still love constructive solid geometry and the ideal of pure curves to define the scene geometry. All these meshes with their triangles! Whatever happened to using NURBS or metaballs or other non-polygonal modeling?
Polygons can be smoother and subdivided efficiently at render time without artifacts, which is how they are used now. Nurbs and other curved surface representations end up with huge problems pragmatically when it comes to tools, workflow, visualization, texture coordinates, keeping the surfaces together etc. The list is long. Polygons are very simple in all these areas and can be made smooth at render time so you get…
That’s the beauty of CSG though... it’s volumetric, not surface based
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#9how is POVRay used in modern workflows these days?
It's extremely counter intuitive to articulate a 3d scene in code. Maybe for some applications, exactness in the 3d scene via code is useful.
Re: Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
#10Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in open source 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically. Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender's Cycle renderer now. The big change is that everyone has moved to "physically based rendering" that do path-tracing for propagating li…
That's rather unfair to POV-Ray. These are hardly representative of what it's capable of. Look through the old IRTC archives, for instance: http://ftp.irtc.org/stills/index.html People were doing stuff like this ( http://oz.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/1999-04-30/13hystri.jpg ) in 1999.
Using this very nice POV-Ray render from Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Gl...
It features a lot of effects (radiosity, HDR maps, etc.) which are added on top of its basic functionality. There's been a big shift in how rendering is approached, from the old way of adding a pile of special effects onto your original non-realistic renderer, to a newer way of simulating light as it physically works and using that as the foundation of the renderer.
And there's still a lot of in-between as well, but having gone from 3ds Max's scanline renderer to 3ds Max + Mental Ray, to Blender + Cycles, it feels very different to use.
There are still some effects that Mental Ray (and it looks like POV-Ray) can do that Cycles can't. Photon-mapped caustics seems to be one, although I think LuxRender is FOSS and can do that.