Ray Tracing

An interest that I picked up in my undergrad days when I wrote a ray-tracer of my own, as part of a fourth-year project, ray-tracing has since been a hobby of mine. Although I haven't been spending any time rendering lately, I have worked on some things that I hope will be useful:

• I am no longer official maintainer of the Raytracing FAQ. The new maintainer is Markus Kniebes <m.kniebes at cyrus.ruhr.de> and the latest version is available at his site.
• I'm an ex-POV-Ray Team Member, formerly in charge of the Unix development and distribution, including the release of the Linux and SunOS binary packages. The POV 3.0 Unix distributions are considerably more Unix-like, thanks to a man page, a ".povrayrc" config file, good X Windows preview display, signal handling, and more.
• I have invested some time into PVM POV-Ray in order to learn about PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine). A patch is available for POV-Ray 3.0 to allow rendering an image/animation on a network of computers.
• I have written jpegpov, a patch so POV-Ray 2.2 can read and write JPEG files directly.
• A gamma test image, created by the PNG development group, is available online with some instructions on how to find out your system's overall display gamma.
• I thought it would be cool if POV-Ray had support to read zipped and/or gzipped files directly, to save on disk space for those large triangle mesh objects, and other large include files. It could all work transparently to the user, and POV-Ray would be able to detect if the input file is compressed, so there shouldn't be any compatibility problems. For UNIX systems, it could just be a pipe to open gunzip to decompress the file, but since the advent of the zlib package, it may be the same patch on those poor platforms that can't multitask. Since PNG uses zlib, this addition shouldn't add too much overhead if you are already using the PNG patch, or POV 3.0 which already uses zlib for the PNG support.
• Another interesting, yet hopefully simple feature that I think should be added to POV-Ray is having it add comments to the output files with info like the author, system, POV version, rendering time, viewpoint, etc, so that at a later date, this info will be available. Sure this can all be added by hand, but then again, you could always create pictures using MS-paint too :-). The PNG patch currently supports automatic comments, and since I wrote the JPEG patch, it may eventually support comments as well. Most output formats support comments, so it shouldn't be too hard to do. If you compile your own version of POV-Ray 3.0, you can enable comments in PNG and PPM output by adding a "#define POV_COMMENTS" in your config.h file.

If you are just interested in ray-tracing, or would like to generate a few sample images on your computer, but don't want to compile it yourself, executables are available for most systems. These come in two flavours: Official executables for DOS, Mac, Windows, Linux, SunOS, and Amiga, and unofficial executables which are for most UNIX systems, or have been modified by someone not on the POV Team either to improve performance on a specific platform, or to add new features.

You can find lots of utilities to aid in generating ray-traced pictures and animations at the POV-Ray home site. This site also has many great ray-traced pictures, to give you an idea of what can be done with this powerful, yet totally free package. You should also have a look at the POV-Ray CDROM, which is available on-line.

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