Documentation:Tutorial Table of Contents

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Main Table of Contents

POV-Ray Reference

Introduction

• Program Description
• What is Ray-Tracing?
• What is POV-Ray?
• Features
• The Early History of POV-Ray

• The Original Creation Message
• The Name
• A Historic 'Version History'

• How Do I Begin?
• Notation and Basic Assumptions

Getting Started

• Our First Image

• Understanding POV-Ray's Coordinate System
• Adding Standard Include Files
• Adding a Camera
• Describing an Object
• Adding Texture to an Object
• Defining a Light Source

• Basic Shapes

• Box Object
• Cone Object
• Cylinder Object
• Plane Object
• Torus Object

• CSG Objects

• What is CSG?
• CSG Union
• CSG Intersection
• CSG Difference
• CSG Merge
• CSG Pitfalls

• Co-incident Surfaces

• The Light Source

• The Pointlight Source
• The Spotlight Source
• The Cylindrical Light Source
• The Area Light Source
• The Ambient Light Source
• Light Source Specials

• Using Shadowless Lights
• Assigning an Object to a Light Source
• Using Light Fading

• Simple Texture Options

• Surface Finishes
• Adding Bumpiness
• Creating Color Patterns
• Pre-defined Textures

• Using the Camera

• Using Focal Blur

• POV-Ray Coordinate System

• Transformations

• Translate
• Scale
• Rotate
• Matrix

• Transformation Order
• Inverse Transform
• Transform Identifiers
• Transforming Textures and Objects

• Setting POV-Ray Options

• Command Line Switches
• Using INI Files
• Using the POVINI Environment Variable

Advanced Features

• Spline Based Shapes

• Lathe Object

• Understanding The Concept of Splines

• Surface of Revolution Object
• Prism Object

• Teaching An Old Spline New Tricks
• Smooth Transitions
• Multiple Sub-Shapes
• Conic Sweeps And The Tapering Effect

• Sphere Sweep Object
• Bicubic Patch Object
• Text Object

• Polygon Based Shapes

• Mesh Object
• Mesh2 Object

• Smooth triangles and mesh2
• UV mapping and mesh2
• A separate texture per triangle

• Polygon Object

• Other Shapes

• Blob Object

• Component Types and Other New Features
• Complex Blob Constructs and Negative Strength

• Height Field Object
• Isosurface Object

• Simple functions
• Several surfaces
• Non-linear functions
• Specifying functions
• Internal functions
• Combining isosurface functions
• Noise and pigment functions
• Conditional directives and loops
• Transformations on functions
• Improving Isosurface Speed

• Poly Object

• Creating the polynomial function
• Writing the polynomial vector

• Superquadric Ellipsoid Object

• Advanced Texture Options

• Pigments

• Using Color List Pigments
• Using Pigment and Patterns
• Using Pattern Modifiers
• Using Transparent Pigments and Layered Textures
• Using Pigment Maps

• Normals

• Using Basic Normal Modifiers
• Blending Normals
• Slope Map Tutorial

• Slopes, what are they?
• Syntax of a slope map
• Examples of slope maps

• Finishes

• Using Ambient
• Using Surface Highlights
• Using Reflection, Metallic and Metallic
• Using Iridescence

• Working With Pigment Maps
• Working With Normal Maps
• Working With Texture Maps
• Working With List Textures
• What About Tiles?
• Average Function
• Working With Layered Textures

• Declaring Layered Textures
• Another Layered Textures Example

• When All Else Fails: Material Maps
• Limitations Of Special Textures

• Using Atmospheric Effects

• The Background
• The Sky Sphere

• Creating a Sky with a Color Gradient
• Adding the Sun
• Adding Some Clouds

• The Fog

• A Constant Fog
• Setting a Minimum Translucency
• Creating a Filtering Fog
• Adding Some Turbulence to the Fog
• Using Ground Fog
• Using Multiple Layers of Fog
• Fog and Hollow Objects

• The Rainbow

• Starting With a Simple Rainbow
• Increasing the Rainbow's Translucency
• Using a Rainbow Arc

• Simple Media Tutorial

• Types of media
• Some media concepts
• Simple media examples

• Emitting media
• Absorbing media
• Scattering media

• Multiple medias inside the same object
• Media and transformations
• A more advanced example of scattering media
• Media and photons

• Radiosity

• Introduction
• Radiosity with conventional lighting
• Radiosity without conventional lighting
• Normals and Radiosity
• Performance considerations

• Making Animations

• The Clock Variable: Key To It All
• Clock Dependant Variables And Multi-Stage Animations
• The Phase Keyword
• Do Not Use Jitter Or Crand
• INI File Settings

• While-loop tutorial

• What a while-loop is and what it is not
• How does a single while-loop work?
• How do I make a while-loop?
• What is a condition and how do I make one?
• What about loop types other than simple for-loops?
• What about nested loops?
• Mixed-type nested loops
• Other things to note

• SDL tutorial: A raytracer

• Introduction
• The idea and the code
• Short introduction to raytracing
• Global settings
• Scene definition
• Initializing the raytracer
• Ray-sphere intersection

• Inner workings of a #macro
• The ray-sphere intersection macro

• The Trace macro

• Calculating the closest intersection
• If the ray doesn't hit anything
• Initializing color calculations
• Going through the light sources
• Shadow test
• Diffuse lighting
• Specular lighting
• Reflection Calculation

• Calculating the image
• Creating the colored mesh

• The structure of the mesh
• Creating the mesh
• Creating the vertex points
• Creating the textures
• Creating the triangles

• The Camera-setup

Questions and Tips

• Language Tips and tricks to achieve useful things

• How do I make a visible light source?
• How do I make bright objects?
• How do I move the camera in a circular path?
• How do I use an image to texture my object?
• How can I generate a spline?
• How can I simulate motion blur?
• How can I find the size of a text object?
• How do I make extruded text?
• How do I make an object hollow?
• How can I fill a glass with water or other objects?
• How can I bend a object?
• Can I get non-grainy focal blur?

• Language Things that don't work as one expects

• Using several transparent objects makes them black?
• I'm getting color banding in the image
• Rotation behaves very strangely
• The image gets distorted when rendering a square image
• Why are there strange dark pixels or noise on my CSG object?
• Why won't the textures in stars.inc work with my sky_sphere?
• When I use filter or transmit with my .tga image map nothing happens.
• Isosurface not rendering properly?

• Language related things

• How do I turn animation on?
• Can POV-Ray use multithreading and/or multiple processors?
• Can I get a wireframe render of my scene?
• Can I specify variable IOR for an object?
• What is Photon Mapping?

• File Formats

• Saving the image to disk.
• Can I convert my POV-Ray scenes to another format?
• How can I convert my scenes from format X to POV-Ray format?
• How do I import all of my textures I created in 3DS Max into POV-Ray?
• How can I avoid artifacts and still get good JPEG compression?
• Why are there no converters from POV to other formats?
• Why are triangle meshes in ASCII format?

• Utilities, models, etc.

• What is the best animation program available?
• Creating/viewing MPEG-files.
• Where can I find models/textures?
• What are the best modellers for POV-Ray?
• Any POV-Ray modellers for Mac?
• Is there any user gallery of POV-Ray images?
• Any good heightfield modellers?
• Any easy way of creating trees?

• Rendering speed

• Will POV-Ray render faster with a 3D card?
• How do I increase rendering speed?
• CSG speed
• Does POV-Ray support 3DNow?

• Miscellaneous questions

• Where do I suggest new features?
• I'm getting a "Illegal grid value in dda_traversal()"
• No beep when finished?
• POV-Ray viruses?
• GUI for Unix POV-Ray?

• The shadow line artifact

• What is the problem?
• What causes the problem?
• Can this problem be solved?
• Possible solutions?

• Smooth triangle artifact

• What is the problem?
• What causes the problem?
• Can this problem be solved?

Appendices

• POV-Ray User License
• Support Library Licenses

• OpenEXR

• Citing POV-Ray in Academic Publications
• The POV-Team

• Contacting the Authors
• The TAG
• POV-Ray 3.6 Development

• What to do if you don't have POV-Ray

• Which Version of POV-Ray should you use?

• Microsoft Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP
• Linux for Intel x86
• Apple Macintosh
• Generic Unix
• All Versions

• Where to Find POV-Ray Files

• World Wide Website www.povray.org
• Books, Magazines and CD-ROMs

• Suggested Reading

Main Table of Contents

POV-Ray Reference

This document is protected, so submissions, corrections and discussions should be held on this documents talk page.