All About


Pov-Ray is a program to create photorealistic images and animations.
The technology that is used to do this is called raytracing. If you want to know more about raytracing read here.

The current version of PoV-Ray is 3.1.

Since version 3 PoV-Ray is as good as most commercial 3D programs, in some cases even better. The program is available for most platforms, including even Amiga. If you have an more exotic platform there's also the source available to compile it to your needs.
You want to know what it costs? I can tell you. Nothing! PoV-Ray is free but it is copyrighted. Read the PoV-Ray Legal Document for more information.


PoV-Ray has its own official Web server: http://www.povray.org.
There you'll find all about the program, get some help and know some of the PoV artists.

You can download the PoV-Ray package from the official FTP site ftp://ftp.povray.org or any other mirror site. See my download section for more information. The PoV-Ray package not only contains the plain executable but also a large collection of sample scenes which give you help and show what is possible with PoV-Ray.

There is also a news group which is not special to PoV-Ray but to raytracing in general. It's name is comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing. If your news server doesn't carry it you can get from PoV-Ray's news server news.povray.org. This group is a good forum to discuss problems that are not mentioned elsewhere and get help in some cases.

Since November 1994 a competition is held regularly. The first one was called The comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing Competition. Every month a new topic was announced and you had 4 weeks to create a raytraced image matching the topic. The entries and results are still available. This first competition was maintained by Matt Kruse. Due to the heavy work and less time of Matt the competition had to be closed in November 1995.

But some month later, in May 1996, a new competion was born: The Internet Raytracing Competition. The rules have changed a bit. A new topic is announced every 2 month, so you have 2 month to create a matching image. And since October 1997 there's also an animation competition held every 3 month. To know more about the IRTC visit their Web site at http://www.irtc.org.

In April 1995 Walnut Creek CDRom has published the first official PoV-Ray CDRom. The title is: Raytrace! The Official POV-Ray CDROM. The CD is a bit out of date now but there are still useful things on it, a lot of phantastic images and animations, many scene files and some useful tools for PoV-Ray and image viewing and manipulation.

The next CDRom came out in September 1997. The title is: The Internet Raytracing Competition CDROM (Year One). It was made because of the first birthday of the competition and contains besides the newest version of PoV-Ray all entries and many scene files and comments of the first year of the IRTC. 

There is a new CDRom available: The Internet Raytracing Competition CDROM (Year Two). It contains the stills results from May 1997 to April 1998 and the animation results from January 1998 to July 1998. There are over 1000 images and source files available on this CD.

All CDs are shipped shipped by Hallam Oaks P/L, Australia to support the operation of www.povray.org and www.irtc.org. So if you want to support the PoV-Ray scene bye them! It's worth it, really.