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POV?
POV
POV is a powerfull ray-tracer. So
gere are some highlights of POV-Ray's features:
- Easy to use scene description
language.
- Large library of stunning example
scene files.
- Standard include files that pre-define
many shapes, colors and textures.
- Very high quality output image
files (up to 48-bit color).
- 15 and 24 bit color display on
many computer platforms using appropriate hardware.
- Create landscapes using smoothed
height fields.
- Many camera types, including
perspective, panorama, orthographic, fisheye, etc.
- Spotlights, cylindrical lights
and area lights for sophisticated lighting.
- Phong and specular highlighting
for more realistic-looking surfaces.
- Inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity)
for more realistic lighting.
- Atmospheric effects like atmosphere,
ground-fog and rainbow.
- Particle media to model effects
like clouds, dust, fire and steam.
- Several image file output formats
including Targa, PNG and PPM.
- Basic shape primitives such as
... spheres, boxes, quadrics, cylinders, cones, triangles and planes
- Advanced shape primitives such
as ... Torii (donuts), bezier patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics,
smooth triangles, text, fractals, superquadrics, surfaces of revolution, prisms,
polygons, lathes and fractals.
- Shapes can easily be combined
to create new complex shapes using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray
supports unions, merges, intersections and differences.
- Objects are assigned materials
called textures (a texture describes the coloring and surface properties of
a shape) and interior properties such as index of refraction and particle
media (formerly known as "halos").
- Built-in color and normal patterns:
Agate, Bozo, Bumps, Checker, Crackle, Dents, Granite, Gradient, Hexagon, Leopard,
Mandel, Marble, Onion, Quilted, Ripples, Spotted, Spiral, Radial, Waves, Wood,
Wrinkles and image file mapping.
- Users can create their own textures
or use pre-defined textures such as ... Brass, Chrome, Copper, Gold, Silver,
Stone, Wood.
- Combine textures using layering
of semi-transparent textures or tiles of textures or material map files.
- Display preview of image while
rendering (not available on all platforms).
- Halt and save a render part way
through, and continue rendering the halted partial render later.
Previous: Preference
Menu Main Index Next: Why
POV?