Welcome, and all that

Welcome to the POV-Ray Cyclopedia of Solutions. This page is desinged to answer specific "how to" questions for POV Ray, the best darned ray tracer I've ever seen. The page is also intended to help explain how certain functions in POV-Ray work and why, and (most importantly) how to exploit them yourself. Why am I doing this? Well, I'd like to return something to the POV-Ray community and hopefully help new users with information about "how to."

The original concept was to collect and organize the tons of helpful answers on the new.povray.org server, but it is certainly not intended to be a home page for those news groups. I also will try my best to make sure I have permission from anyone whose post I have quoted from, so if you happen to see something that you wrote and didn't say ok to, accept my apologies and let me know if I need to remove it.

10-27-01. Unfortunately I have lost my hard drive and not all of my data was backed up. If you were on my mailing list you're address were lost. Please send me another email so I can rebuild my list. I have some old email, but my address book didn't make the backup. This was purely my mistake and I apologize for the hassle. Hopefully I will have some new material soon

Register now to receive email when this page is updated with new files. Click here to be removed form the list. If you have any questions, please e-mail me.

What's New

December 8, 2001. I added the missing code in background.html. Thanks to Sergio Lobianco de Almeida for pointing this one out.

October 30, 2001. I added a few more tutorials on bezier curves, bicubic patches, and uv mapping on multiple smooth bicubic patches.

A new look on August 24, 2001. All of the cyclopedia pages will be updated to a new look over the next week or so. The page is now written with HTML 4.01 strict and CSS level 2. Hopefully there will be new content, but since I'm also working on the POV-Ray book project, I don't know how much I'll had here and submit there.

There are three times of special items that I occasionally put in the Cyclopedia:

I am also asking for feedback on the new design. Some of these pages take quite a bit of scolling to go through. As users, would you like to see multiple pages for each lesson? Would it be more helpful if it was possible to access just parts of a lesson through a link on this page? Please let me know.

Solutions

This section was the original intent of the Cyclopedia. To collect tips and tricks from the newsgroups and mailing list and publish and explain them. This is hard work and I don't do as much of this as I'd like to do.

A Tutorial on Bezier Curves New 10-30-01
A Tutorial on creating several smooth Bicubic Patches New 10-30-01
UV Mapping on Bicubic Patches New 10-30-01
Fading between textures
Using an image as the background*
Getting feet to walk.
Making Coins with Image Maps
Hardwood Floors*
Labeling a bottle

User Documentation

I am slowly building one. Here are the current entries:

Cylindrical Cameras New 2-20-2001 (after salvage)
Image_map (Planar projection)
The looks_like statement*
Rand and Seed
The Sky Vector
A look at smooth_triangles
Another look at smooth_triangles
vaxis_rotate
vcross
vnormalize
vrotate

* -- Indicates that the tutorial has been upgraded to the new look and feel of the Cyclopedia

Include Files

Tutorial on grasspatch.inc.

Gallery

The Abandoned Road

The Abandoned Road was my entry for the IRTC Ruins round (Jan-Feb 2000). It utilized the original grasspatch.inc file. In fact, I made the include file for this scene. I released it early enough that another person was able to use it in his IRTC entry. You can see Chris McCabe's Forgotten Graves here.

The Thing Under the Stairs

The Thing Under the Stairs is a text adventure game I started to write several years ago when I learned TADS. This image is a scene from the opening of the game that I visualized and would use on any promotions I did for the game, once it's finished. The scene uses my technique for hardwood floors.

You can see my full gallery here.

There are some features that are really cool and I think most POVers should have this trick in their arsenal.

There are also, sadly, some features of POV-Ray which cause headaches, so if you see that little pill of aspirin, it could be bad.

There are also tricks that can save time in coding and help POV-Ray parse a scene faster than a 'brute force' method.

Links

Here are other places of interest regarding the Persitence of Vision ray tracer

Click here to go back to my home page

This page was last updated on