Topic awaiting preservation: POV-Ray (Page 1 of 1)

Kind of neat. I downloaded it a day or so ago and have been playing around. I can't see how some of the people make such great works. Ahh well. I made a cueball looking thing on a green mat looking thing that kind of resembles a pool table cloth. An orange ball with a focal blur on it in the background. Maybe one day I could get the white dots and numbers on them heh. If my FTP was working I'd let you guys pick it apart heh but sadly it's not just yet.

EDIT: I was going to say that my biggest problem right now is getting the spheres to be where I want them. I think I'm figuring it out though. I was also going to ask how long some of you guys used the program before you started turning out really interesting works?

God bless,
Atomic

[This message has been edited by At0mic_PC (edited 10-01-2002).]

one of my first povray images:

POV's a great program, and well worth the investment of time it'd take to get good with it. With the latest version, there are so many nifty features you could spend hours experimenting with that I can see how it may seem daunting. But it's just a matter of sitting down and playing with it. As far as placing objects is concerned, try these three things. Determine the relative scale you want for the scene. i.e., if the central object is a pool ball, make it one unit in size and make everything else relative to that size scale (so a pool stick would be something like 15-20 units in length). Use a piece of graph paper to rough sketch the placement of objects in your scene, making each square on the paper equivilant to a consistent number of units in POV. And thirdly, take a dummy scene of a couple of objects, with the camera high above looking down, and play around with the translate and rotate commands to visually get a handle on how they work.

As for early images.. Well I don't have many left, but here's one from back in the days of my 486 and POV 2.0. I got started back with a book called Ray Tracing Creations that included POV 1.5 that a friend had. Later on, I bought the second edition of that book (in 1994), and I still have it. It rests under my trackball.



[This message has been edited by Witherin (edited 10-01-2002).]

[This message has been edited by Witherin (edited 10-01-2002).]

Hmm, define "really interesting". =) At my images page you can see what I've done and when, but it was at least a couple of months before I created the first image (second from bottom) with POV-Ray; and the image is little more than some spheres and a plane with interesting textures.

Be sure to go through the tutorials in the help file that comes with the program (click the "Scene" button in the Windows interface). As far as getting things where you want them, it's usually a matter of placing them, rendering real quick, tweaking their position, rerendering, and continuing that process until you get it just right. After some practice you can do it pretty well.

Just keep practicing =)

Well you have some very interesting pics. I really do need to do all of the tutorials in there, but in my little experiment I kind of got side tracked. Now I'm searching for the correct way to take an image and wrap it around the sphere. Google hasn't been nice on it heh. See I need a 1 for the one ball and a 5 for the five ball. I also want some chalk dust on the cue heh. And while my spheres are ball shaped, the shading of them kind of goes in spurts rather than a smooth color shading thing. Even at high resolutions. Or especially I should say. I've also been playing around with the camera and especially lighting.

Well thanks for all the constructive advice...

God bless,
Atomic

[This message has been edited by At0mic_PC (edited 10-04-2002).]