Ray Tracer POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer creates three-dimensional, photorealistic images using a rendering technique called ray tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file. Ray tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective, and other effects.

The ray tracer POV-Ray is installed for the systems IBM AIX 4.1, IRIX 53/62 (sgi) and SunOS 5.3/5.4/5.5 (Solaris); It can be activated with the command povray .

Documentation is available in HTML format, as a PDF file, as PostScript (243 pages) and as a plain text file.

For details of the command see man-page: (povray).

Examples mentioned in the documentation are available in the directory /afs/ipp/common/soft/graphics/povray/demo/ .