[HN Gopher] Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
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Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)
Author : amock
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-12-10 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| chmod775 wrote:
| The amount of comments comparing POV-Ray to Blender is really
| puzzling to me. The comparison is apples to oranges.
|
| In fact you could (and probably still can) use POV-Ray to render
| your Blender scene. Blender is not a renderer - it just ships
| with some integrated ones and integrations for various external
| ones.
| philote wrote:
| I was just telling my son about POV-Ray yesterday, since he's
| starting to learn to use Blender and I dabbled with POV-Ray as a
| teen. I'm quite impressed that it's still being actively
| developed 30 years later.
| ttul wrote:
| Hi got into ray tracing back in the early 1990s as a teenager.
| The community back then was very small and we all had
| ridiculously horrible computers. But it was still a lot of fun
| and I remember doing cool things such as adding a fog command to
| the ray tracer, which taught me a lot about programming.
|
| For some reason, it's just really captivating to build a scene
| using declarative code, rather than doing so visually in an
| editor like Blender.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| On a side note, you can basically do the same thing in 2D with
| the SVG format, and you can even alter the properties
| programmatically when used within a webpage.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| POV-Ray has a powerful set of solid geometry operations and is
| quite good for generating scene descriptions from another program
| and then invoking PV to render.
|
| Obviously it's command line rather than a visual tool.
| sllabres wrote:
| There was a nice GUI back then, developed Independent from the
| POVRAY renderer named "Moray". More surprisingly, there is
| still a website online for the GUI:
|
| http://www.stmuc.com/moray/
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I enjoy diving into POV-Ray these days. It's a fun way to get
| away from GUI-driven work I might do in other 3D software.
|
| One cool thing about the experience of using POV is that you can
| scroll in one dimension and see the entire organization of
| elements that will become a sensory window into the imagination.
| If you can learn the syntax and options, you can effectively
| break down what would otherwise be many different sets of
| interfaces and gain an enhanced feeling of accessibility.
|
| If you combine this with an appreciation for abstraction-focused
| scene modeling, you can reach this point of really amazing
| emotion where you realize you can create or model _anything_ with
| the provided tools, as long as you can embrace the need for
| abstraction as its own sort of user-mindset technology.
|
| The closest analog that comes to mind outside of 3D would be
| MacPaint, MS Paint, Grafx2...if you've ever seen someone
| seriously plan their home garden or design a home theater in one
| of those apps, and then build the damn thing in real life, you
| may know what I'm talking about.
|
| Outside of that...maybe something like watching a concept
| designer use a bic crystal pen to sketch out an entire world on
| newsprint.
|
| With POV-Ray I find myself honing in on something like an
| intuitive feel for how much abstraction to employ to simply and
| effectively depict what I want to depict, given any time
| constraints. It's really cool to reach that point no matter the
| tool. I'm sure a lot of people feel similar feelings about their
| favorite programming tools as well.
| bxrxdx wrote:
| I loved povray when i was a kid. Very cool its still around.
| postit wrote:
| My computer graphics class used pov ray back in early 2000s. I
| remember I wrote a Perl script to generate my scenes to avoid
| typing things manually. I still may have the code somewhere.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Not to hate on the job done here. But I think most people today
| (or even back in 2013) could have gotten further with Blender
| from an artistic perspective.
|
| Blender 2.4 was kind of terrible to use from an animation
| perspective, but the controls for simple objects / cycles
| rendering was never really that difficult IMO. The key was having
| the knowledge to stay on the "nice parts" of Blender.
|
| Blender 2.6 and 3.0 these days have made great strides at being
| easier to use from an animation and rigging perspective.
|
| ------
|
| The harsh shadow lines could be made easier if you used area-
| lamps (in Blender) for example. They probably exist in POV-ray,
| but a 3d GUI to move-and-place these objects around grossly
| simplifies the effort, compared to placing the objects around
| with a text-based format like POV-Ray.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| From an artistic perspective, constraints drive creativity!
| chmod775 wrote:
| POV-Ray is a renderer. And just that. In fact you could (and
| probably still can) use POV-Ray to render your Blender scene.
|
| Comparing POV-Ray to Cycles or Octane would make more sense.
| Moru wrote:
| There were GUI's for POV-Ray too, Moray i used extensibly, and
| something for the Atari I forgotten what it was called, didn't
| use it much.
|
| I started with my 8 MHz Atari, each test scene took at least 10
| minutes for a stamp-size picture and then the sphere was in the
| wrong place and wasn't visible or the wrong texture. It took me
| soo long to get the hang of the coordinate system and the
| language. But fun it was!
|
| I printed the documentation so I could read it while the
| computer was buzy rendering.
|
| I also wrote a small program for my Atari Falcon that would
| turn of the graphics chip to give me more rendering speed.
| Since it was a shared bus it used up something like 25% CPU on
| full colour.
| repomies69 wrote:
| The point of povray is that you program the scenes. Maybe
| something like "25 days of blender python scenes" would be
| equivalent.
| mschaef wrote:
| > if you used area-lamps (in Blender) for example. They
| probably exist in POV-ray,
|
| They do: http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.2/38/
|
| > a 3d GUI to move-and-place these objects around grossly
| simplifies the effort, compared to placing the objects around
| with a text-based format like POV-Ray.
|
| This can depend on what you're doing and what background you
| bring to the work. ie: Just recently, I've found myself more
| effective developing 3D print designs using a textual language
| than via a drag/drop UI. (But I bring a programming background,
| like to think in abstractions, and was making designs that were
| quite inorganic...)
| elihu wrote:
| It's a different experience. POV-Ray is basically a programming
| language. If you want to generate geometry programmatically
| there's nothing quite like it. The "programming" features are
| primitive ("if" statements, loops, eventually they added macros
| that act like procedure calls...) but the way you describe
| geometry and textures is actually pretty nice.
|
| POV-Ray is also very old. Turner Whitted's recursive ray
| tracing paper is from 1979. POV-Ray was released in 1991, but
| was based on an earlier raytracer called DKBTrace that was
| written sometime in the 80's. Blender is more modern and isn't
| built around the limitations of what was feasible to render in
| a reasonable amount of time on the computers of the 80's and
| 90's.
| amock wrote:
| I think POV-Ray was probably more impressive in 2000 than 2013,
| but even today I like the method of creating graphics via text
| rather than a GUI. That's probably because I'm a programmer
| rather than an artist, but it's why I still think fondly of
| POV-Ray even though it really has been surpassed in almost
| every way by Blender.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The text-based format is certainly superior for a programmer,
| who can write a script to output POV-Ray data.
|
| Blender of course has a Python API, but the text for POV-Ray
| is almost certainly easier to think and use. After all,
| Python's "print" statement is just easier to use than going
| into Blender docs wondering what bpy.context.blend_data is
| exactly.
|
| ------
|
| That's probably POV-Ray's biggest feature. It is truly a
| domain-specific language for describing 3d worlds and
| objects.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Interesting it is still around, I knew a couple of people during
| the 1990's that were deep into it.
|
| Alongside using Enlightenment as their window manager.
|
| It was always cool to check their desktops.
| quitit wrote:
| Unrelated but might trigger a few memories on here: I managed
| to get a copy of povray on one of those freeware cd-roms that
| computer stores often sold for a few dollars (since the
| internet wasn't a thing yet and getting it from compuserve was
| tricky). I think I sunk years of my life rendering beginners
| geometry, all the usuals: snowmen (spheres!), tables of still
| life geometry, basic animal characters and lots of snow scenes
| or rippling water sunsets (povray was particularly good for
| these.)
| kingcharles wrote:
| That's probably where I got it from too, as I used it pre-
| Internet.
|
| It's funny to think I had to leave my 286 on all night to get
| a single 320x200 render like those in OP's link. Now you can
| render scenes like that in realtime.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| i made this using pov ray https://youtu.be/E6RGjxUOI68
|
| i like using code instead of a gui for some 3d stuff
| seligman99 wrote:
| Since we're showing things off, I made this in POV-Ray
| https://youtu.be/KU7V3UkRNy0
|
| I actually made it several years ago, probably around 2007, I
| only re-rendered it and uploaded it to YouTube recently. I
| always felt there was a rather painful skill ceiling in POV-
| Ray. Sure, people have done some really amazing things with it,
| but going from something fairly simple like this to something
| really impressive required a level of magic and time I could
| never get out of POV-Ray.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Great choice of music. From the album "Music to Moog By".
| sampo wrote:
| Do you need/want the bars of the 3d bar chart to cast shadows?
| You can turn the shadows off, too.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Renderings look a bit dated, like Whitted style forward-only Ray
| tracing used in its infancy.
| baldgeek wrote:
| any similiar tutorial series like this for Blender?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Happy memories. I grew up with POVRAY.EXE in the 90s.
|
| I had no idea, back then, just how much impact the process of
| thinking in CSG would have on my nascent mind.
|
| A truly great piece of software for a wain cutting their teeth
| with math and programmatic construction.
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