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: Persistence of Vision Development Team
- 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
- A simple tutorial on using the Persistence of Vision raytracer, for people who cannot draw to save their life!
- 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 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
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.
