Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Persistence of Vision
- The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or POV-Ray, is 3-dimensional raytracing software that uses text files to tell it where to put objects and effects in a scene. Unlike most raytracing software, POV-Ray does not require you to be skilled at drawing. At its most basic, you tell POV that you want one shape here, another shape there, and you’d like to combine these two simple shapes into a more complex shape, and put it over there. But you do not…
- Your first scene
- Your first scene in Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Constructing objects
- POV-Ray gives you several simple objects that you can place in your scene. If you want more complex objects there are several ways of getting them. One of these ways is using constructive solid geometry, or CSG. With CSG you take simple objects and combine them into more complex objects. You can merge objects, unite them, cut them, and intersect them.
- More about pigments
- That pigment statement has been standing out like a sore thumb, because we haven’t really talked about it yet. What’s the point of having a whole section for pigment if the only thing we can put in there are colors? In fact, we can do quite a bit more. Pigments can contain patterns.
- A little background
- While we were working on the cylindrical pattern, we added a background section to the test scene. Backgrounds tie into what we talked about earlier with alpha channels. The background is what POV-Ray shows when there is nothing in the scene. By default, POV-Ray shows black when there is nothing in the scene, but we can tell POV-Ray to show something else.
- The moon is a harsh normal
- Our planetary model needs a moon. Let’s add a smaller sphere orbiting our big blue sphere. We’ll make this one gray, and angle it just a bit less than we angled the planet’s rings.
- Simple Photorealism: Cameras
- Cameras in Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Simple Photorealism: Resolution
- Let’s talk a little about the resolution of your image. You might, for example, need a high-resolution image for printing on an 8.5 by 11 inch paper. Your computer screen usually displays 72 pixels per inch. So when we create a 640 by 480 pixel image, that ends up being about 8.8 inches by 6.7 inches on the screen.
- Open Source License
- Open Source License in Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Simple Photorealism (full HTML) (81.6 KB)
- HTML version of Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Simple Photorealism (full PDF) (2.9 MB)
- PDF version of Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- Simple Photorealism (full RTF) (2.2 MB)
- RTF version of Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision
- ZIP Resources for Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision (5.6 MB)
- Resources for Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision, including samples and document graphics.
