Saturday, February 16, 2008
Playing with povray ....
Heard about Povray on FLOSS weekly. Povray is a "ray tracing" renderer .... think 3-D graphics. In a nutshell you describe objects to be rendered (box, sphere, plane), specify lighting conditions and let it fly.
This is not some "drag and drop" tool .... it requires actual programming in Povray's "Scene Description Language" (SDL) to produce a picture.
I'm not artistic by any stretch of the imagination. I'm at best geometric, I can draw straight lines with a ruler. I kick-ass with programs like Viso or the open source Equivalent Dia, but to draw something free hand and representing three dimensions .... forget it. I like playing with Povray because it's mathematical and I can fine tune pictures by adjusting numbers. I never thought I could be so artistic!!!
Here is the SDL for my first picture. (ASCII text)
And this is what it produced:
May not look like much ... but consider the power of this program .... all I did was specify the location of the box, the sphere, the lighting and the camera (or viewer) ... it figured out all th shading and shadows. Pretty cool, huh??
#posted by Rob Roschewsk @ 11:09 AM
Comments:
Thank you for mentioning FLOSS "Weekly" on your blog. The next show is about Blender, so hopefully you'll have more things to make neat pictures with after listening!
# posted by 
Randal L. Schwartz @ 5:25 PM