Art & Artists

A Compressed Picture is Worth 1024 Words

It is much easier to explain what you can do with a ray tracer by showing you some images and movies created with one... so sit back and enjoy the view!

	Eduard's Kazoola This is a Kazoola, part toy, part musical instrument, found in a recent archeological dig in our children's room. Judging from the strata, this is likely from the early Seussian period. We took this 3-D POV-Ray picture of it before destroying it... we accidentally found that blowing into any of the holes produces a 120 decibel reverberation that blew out all the windows of the house. After some research, we also found that the surface can easily be generated from a 6th order polynomial, something well within POV-Ray's abilities. Due to recent requests, Eduard has revealed the polynomial equation that generates this surface: -0.1*x^6 - 0.2*x^4 + 0.6*x^2y^2z^2 - 0.4*x^2 - 0.1*y^6 - 0.2*y^4 - 0.4*y^2 - 0.1*z^6 - 0.2*z^4 - 0.4*z^2 + 4
	The IRTC CD-ROMs The IRTC CDROMs are a compilation of all entries made to the Internet Raytracing Competition during its a year of operation. As the IRTC is bi-monthly, this covers round #1 (May/June) to round #6 (March/April) of each year. There are over 1000 images and 500 source archives available. Sales of these CD-ROMs support the ongoing operation of the povray.org and irtc.org web servers.
	"Memory 1" Click on this image to get a full screen image & description.
	"3 Worlds" Click on this image to get a full screen image & description, and see it as a QuickTime movie!
	"Entertain 1" Click on this image to get a full screen image & description.

Artists & Images

• Gilles Tran - A master of POV-Ray. One of the most realistic images ever created with POV-Ray is his March-April 2000 IRTC winning image "The wet bird". Other oustanding works include "The chess game" and "The thin wall".
• Nathan O'Brien - Another master of POV-Ray and frequent winner of the IRTC competition. Some of his winning works are "This Little Piggy" and " Glory"
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• Some retired POV-Ray masters are Dan Farmer, Robert Mickelson and Truman Brown. They created images with POV-Ray and even its parent DKB Trace long before the WWW was invented.
• Evelio Perez-Albuerne has an amazing assortment of Babylon-5 spaceship models as images and as DXF and other 3-D formats.
• Anton Raves has some amazing Lego-block scenes.
• Tore Nordstrand's web page has a gallery of beautiful and unusual mathematical surfaces, with the POV scene sources that made them. Looking for Klein bottles, knots, or moebius strips, check here first!
• Henri Sivonen has some POV-Ray QuickTime and QuickTime VR images on his on his home page.

Helper Scene files, Objects, Textures

• Dutch artist Anton Raves has published his amazing POV-Ray LEGO scene library for Mac OS/Windows so you can make your own LEGO scenes!
• Derek Owens has a web page with some include files of objects you can download and use.
• Russell Towle has created an elegantly simple flexible star-making include file which creates "regular convex polygons and also star polygons of N sides, adding spheres for each of the N vertices and cylinders for each of the N edges." He's also put together an amazing encyclopedia of POV-Ray include files for Uniform Polyhedra (MacOS-format only for now). "Uniform polyhedra are bounded by regular polygons, and possess symmetries such that all vertices are equivalent. This definition is broad enough so that, included within the uniform polyhedra, we find the five Platonic solids, the thirteen Archimedean solids, the four Kepler-Poinsot star-polyhedra, and many other lovely and complex star-polyhedra."
• René-Raphaël Pautasso has an interesting animation rendered with POV-Ray Mac available for viewing (requires QuickTime 4 or later) on his page.
• There is a huge library of INCLUDE files being collected at The PILE.
• There is a list of utilities and INCLUDEs being collected at Shawn Fumo's site.