Persistence of Vision tutorial
I’ve just finished and uploaded a Persistence of Vision tutorial I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time. I had an epiphany of sorts on Friday about a project that would work perfectly for going, step-by-step, through the very basics of creating 3-D images using POV-Ray.
This image of a planet with rings and a moon, against a starry backdrop, is easy to make and takes only a few lines of instructions for POV-Ray. And it's a lot of fun.
Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision will complement my Persistence of Text collection of POV-Ray tutorials. Despite what it looks like, I haven’t given up on those, and have had a 12-sided die tutorial outlined for a while now.
This tutorial is available under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.1 and is available in HTML, PDF, and Rich Text Format.
- POV-Ray
- POV-Ray is a ray-tracing program for Macintosh, Unix, DOS, and Windows. It is very powerful, full-featured, reliable, and free. It also uses a “programmer-style” interface rather than a graphical one. The tutorial that comes with it is well-written, so it’s worth a look .Persistence of Vision is very useful for those of us who like to automate our image creation. It uses a simple scripting language to build up complex 3-dimensional imagery.
- Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Simple photorealism for people who can’t draw. This tutorial guides you through using the free Persistence of Vision ray-tracer. You’ll create a planet, with rings and an orbiting moon set against a starry background.
- Persistence of Text
- A series of useful Persistence of Vision tutorials, starting with the very basics of simple object creation and progressing to automation and the usefulness of math.
- Internet and Programming Tutorials
- Internet and Programming Tutorials ranging from HTML, Javascript, and AppleScript, to Evaluating Information on the Net and Writing Non-Gendered Instructions.
More cool software
- Smultron text editor
- Peter Borg’s new open source text editor features tabbed windows, split views, remembering multiple open files, and dividing files into projects.
- iLife ’06 Review: The Good and the Ugly
- The new iLife for 2006 comes with several extremely useful new features, and one very strange, nearly useless but very pretty addition.
- Importing vinyl into iTunes
- This script takes songs split by marker from SoundStudio and converts them directly into iTunes, setting track number, track total, and album name along with the song title.
More Persistence of Vision
- Sparkling lights for Christmas
- This POV-Ray scene file will animate sparkling lights against a green background. If you want to make three dimensional images with lots of similar objects and then animate them, this will show you how to do it.
- Have a Merry Scripting Christmas with Persistence of Vision
- The ASCII Merry Christmas from Astounding Scripts was taken from a scene I created in Persistence of Vision. It’s a very simple scene that highlights many of the advantages of using POV to create images.
- Photo-editing with Persistence of Vision
- You can use the Persistence of Vision raytracer from the command-line to add elements to photos.
More tutorials
- Django tutorial mostly ready
- My long-promised Django tutorial is pretty much ready. It’s still designed around an in-person tutorial, but you should be able to get started using it even if you’re on your own.
- JavaScript for Beginners revised
- I’ve completely revised my JavaScript for Beginners tutorials to be more in tune with modern JavaScript, and to provide more useful examples in general.
- Invariant sections to disappear from the FDL?
- The Free Software Foundation is revisiting the GNU Free Documentation License. Hopefully, they’ll fix the problem of invariant sections in otherwise open documents.
- Perls before Swine Perl tutorial
- I’ve completely revamped my Perl tutorial, and explicitly released it under the Gnu FDL. This tutorial starts from a simple filter that does nothing but echo to the terminal window, and ends with the ability to split data according to fields and import data into a SQLite database.
- JavaScript for Beginners update
- The JavaScript tutorial has been updated by introducing loops earlier, and in the first section.
- Two more pages with the topic tutorials, and other related pages