POVRay 101: A Beginner's Guide

[Redrobes]

This is very cool and I would like to thank you for putting this together. I am a coder and I feel intimidated by POVRay. I know I shouldn't but it seems to me that you need something interactive when making objects. I always thought that you were using something interactive to build it with and then using POVRay as the renderer to describe the scene and put all the objects into it. But if your doing them all by text code then that is quite something.

I dont think POVRay is unique at all being a text language for rendering. Most of the high end stuff does it this way but uses a GUI on top to make the stuff and build it for you. I think Renderman and Gelato are both like this. I also think that even Blender under the hood is kind of like this too. Its certainly trying to build some kind of XML description of the scene. As far as I can tell, the big studios use something like Maya / Alias to build the scene and then renderman as the scene description language then its sent to the render farm to get generated. So learning POVRay is probably a good idea if you want to make a film as it is done in that same kind of manner.

But I would still like to know how to build models in some GUI based thing before sending it to POVRay to render. You ideas about the auto generating towns are a good idea to do in POVRay since you can make a program or script to generate the scene text and then let the engine render it out. You don't have to get involved with the rendering at all. Its like the 3D equivalent of ImageMagick. So what I would like to know is, if you are building something complex, can you get some kind of feedback or preview of what your doing before letting it render the whole thing out ? A lot of what I build is moderately free form and you drag points out and move it here and there by eye. You cant do it with numbers. Just as an instant example, I was making a pair of sunglasses the other day. What process would you go through to make these in POVRay or is it just not geared up for this kind of thing ?

[Midgardsormr]

I dont think POVRay is unique at all being a text language for rendering. Most of the high end stuff does it this way but uses a GUI on top to make the stuff and build it for you. I think Renderman and Gelato are both like this. I also think that even Blender under the hood is kind of like this too. Its certainly trying to build some kind of XML description of the scene. As far as I can tell, the big studios use something like Maya / Alias to build the scene and then renderman as the scene description language then its sent to the render farm to get generated. So learning POVRay is probably a good idea if you want to make a film as it is done in that same kind of manner.

If you were so inclined, you could build a scene in Maya entirely in MEL (Maya Embedded Language) or even Python. Every command issued through the GUI appears in the script editor as code as you go along, and there have been a few times where I've just typed in the command I wanted rather than trying to remember which menu it was in. Most of the time, though, the script editor is used to easily automate frequently used tasks and to create expressions that control animated properties. I've never used Renderman, but I use Mental Ray quite a bit. If they're similar, then I'd guess not many artists would send a Maya script directly to the renderer and try to write the shaders there. Rather, they'd be likely to use a plug-in to the GUI that allows them to construct the shader visually.

That's not to say that some of the old-school uber-geeks (i.e. pipeline TDs) don't do things that way, but it's quite rare.

Anyway, thanks for the tutorial. I don't have time to read it right now, but I'll definitely put it on the front-burner for tomorrow!