The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray, “povray” to its fans) is a multiplatform, ray tracing program. Because it was developed before the GPL by an international team of individuals, some of whom are no longer available, povray is currently “copyrighted freeware”, although the development team plans to release a future version under GPL. Povray has been used for creating stunning three dimensional graphics by showing off different light sources, photon mapping, photo blur and other photorealistic capabilities. Greg will give a brief history of the program and then give an advanced tutorial by explaining, line by line, the code used in one of his more advanced projects. This animation, The Relativity Train, is a humorous demonstration about how the speed of light is constant from all points of reference. While GUI modelers are available for povray, this project is all code … editing text with no GUI. Video and audio recording of the lecture is of course welcome, but the files for the whole project will not be released electronically.
Greg M. Johnson is a failure analysis engineer at IBM’s 300 mm semiconductor fab. He has been using povray since 1996 and is the author of some scene files that ship with the program. As a hobbyist, he has participated in several animation competitions and was the winner (and sole entrant) to the January 2009 TC-RTC competition. This entry, The Relativity Train, made use of some of the advanced features of a povray fork called MegaPov.
Lightning Talks
- Etherpad-lite - Sean Dague
- Map of Vassar College - Ben Stoutenburgh
- Why XfreeRDP is awesome - Joe Apuzzo
Show Notes Related to Talk on POV-Ray
- Povray home page: http://povray.org/
- Povray Hall of Fame: http://hof.povray.org/
- The history of the name of povray: http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/9/
- The license of povray: http://www.povray.org/distribution-license.html
- Povray license “versus” Knoppix: http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Bugs/4.0
- “Software issues” and an animation contest: http://www.irtc.org/
- Shortest Code Contest, Round 5: http://paulbourke.net/exhibition/scc5/final.html
- Shortest Code Contest, Round 4 : http://paulbourke.net/exhibition/scc4/final/
- Shortest Code Contest, Round 2: ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/short/short2/shortvote2.html
- “The Relativity Train” video: http://vimeo.com/4205262
- Early povray developer bio: http://cyborg5.com/hcp/
- Great povray artists/ resources: Gilles Tran: http://www.oyonale.com/modeles.php?format=POV&lang=en
- Great povray artists/ resources: Jaime Vives Piqueres: http://www.ignorancia.org/en/index.php?page=Work_methods
- Greg’s work: http://exether.free.fr/irtc/index.php?sub=pg2002&lang=en&auth=greg_m__johnson