HowTo:Contents
The following is a list of the currently-available 'How To' articles. If you add a new article, please list it here.
Please also read our Editing Guidelines prior to creating any articles.
Suggestions
It would be handy if some users co-operated in working out a 'wishlist' of articles and a hierarchy for them, and then created the links to the empty pages from this page.
Discussions should be held on the talk page, not here.
Completed articles
- How to: Use constructive solid geometry
- How to: Use conditional structures
- How to: Use macros and loops
Work-in-Progress Articles
Animating your creations
- How to: Create animations
- How to: Create more complex animations
- How to: Animation pitfalls
- How to: Encode animations as Ogg Theora Video (A non-proprietary video file format)
Objects
- How to: Use constructive solid geometry
- How to: Use the blob object
- How to: Use the isosurface object
- How to: Use the lathe object
- How to: Use the plane object
- How to: Use spline and bezier curves
Texturing
- How to: Use UV-mapping
- How to: Use an image as a texture
- How to: Turn a continuous function into a stepped function
Lighting
- How to: Make soft shadows using the area_light
- How to: Simulate real-world ambient light
- How to: Simulate real-world optical effects
- How to: Make realistic outdoor lighting
- How to: Make realistic indoor lighting
Special effects in POV-Ray
- How to: Use fog and media
- How to: Use rainbow
- How to: Use photons
- How to: Use radiosity
- How to: Use sky_sphere and background
- How to: Fix old scenes to work with the new gamma system
- How to: Render LDraw scenes for polarized glasses (off site, needs to be re-written in more general terms that are not LDraw-specific)
- How to create focal blur manually
Special output in POV-Ray
- How to: Create anaglyph images
- How to: Create multi-phase web buttons
- How to: Create images for use as a heightfield
- How to: Utilize the histogram
- How to: Create high precision heightfields using POV-Ray
Working with POV-Ray
Platform-specific tips to get the most out of POV-ray:
- How to: Install multiple versions of POV-Ray
- How to: Configure your favorite text editor to work with POV-Ray
POV-Ray for Microsoft Windows
POV-Ray for Mac OS / Mac OS X
POV-Ray for Unix
Building Scenes in POV-Ray
Scene Description Language
Troubleshooting your scene
This section is for figuring out why your scene isn't rendering as expected. For problems related to installation or removal of POV-Ray, updates, crashes, or other software-related issues, see General POV-Ray troubleshooting.
- Why is my image completely black?
- Why aren't all of my objects showing up?
- Why doesn't my fog or other media show up?
- What are all of these weird speckles on my object?
- What is the best way to fix holes in my isosurface?
- Why are my expressions not evaluating to 1 (or some other integer)?
General POV-Ray troubleshooting
This section is for software problems with POV-Ray. If you are trying to figure out why your scene isn't rendering as expected, see Troubleshooting Your Scene.