POV-Ray

Chris Cason writes "It was 25 years ago today (18 August 1994) that I registered the POVRAY.ORG domain. While the project had a presence on the internet prior to this, the 18th was the beginning of having our 'own place' - a permanent somewhere that ... [More] wasn't just a sub-directory or forum on someone else's server". Having a domain dedicated to a free software project wasn't nearly as common back then as it is today and has allowed us to provide a stable location and email addresses for the project for a quarter of a century now. While we'd like to show you what the site looked like back in late '94, unfortunately we predate even the Internet Archive (a.k.a. wayback machine) and have no copy of our early web server setup. [Less]

Eric Haines dropped us a line to let us know that there is still time to submit proposals to Ray Tracing Gems, with the final deadline being final October 15th 2018. Eric also commented "They don't have to be about DXR, they could be survey or ... [More] reference articles, or general principles worth writing down in one spot. We hope people will contact us informally about ideas for proposals before the paper deadline." [Less]

POV-Ray 3.7.1 has officially entered public beta testing phase. Source code and a Windows installer can be found on our GitHub repository. For more information and feedback please visit the povray.beta-test newsgroup (also accessible via our web interface). An unofficial Mac version can once again be found on megapov.inetart.net.

We've become aware that since late November 2015 some visitors in the Scandinavian region have been unable to access povray.org and its related sites via their broadband connection, but find that when using a mobile connection the site works fine. ... [More] This issue affects visitors whose ISP's rely on TeliaSonera for transit or routing information (while there may be other backbone providers affected, we have not received examples other than Telia). Basically Telia are not receiving (or not accepting, we are not sure which) routing information for the network that povray.org is hosted on (203.29.75.0/24, advertised on AS6062). At this point the matter is out of our hands as it involves backbone providers and how they exchange BGP routing information. The issue has been brought to the attention of providers in both the USA (where our network is hosted) and Sweden, and we can only wait to see if or when they will resolve it. Please also note that affected visitors will probably not be able to successfully email us regarding the issue if they use their ISP-provided email accounts as these will generally use the same routing tables as used for general web browsing. Using GMail or other non-ISP-specific services ought to work. We will update this post as more information becomes available. Update: As of July/August 2016 this issue seems to have cleared up. [Less]

It was "back in 1986 or so" that David K. Buck started work on DKBTrace, and it was in July 1991 that the first version of its successor project saw the light of day. What was then called STAR-Light, and later renamed to PV-Ray and ultimately ... [More] POV-Ray, has therefore been on this planet for a whopping 9,190 (or 11,000) revolutions by now (plus another guesstimated 150 above it). Of course we faithfully continue our effort to keep it that way, and although this website has been rather silent since the official release of POV-Ray 3.7.0 in November 2013, that's only because work has been proceeding elsewhere: Ever since the 3.7.0 release, development has been revolving around or GitHub repository. Pre-release builds are also published there, on a semi-irregular basis, in the releases section. The most up-to-date documentation is being maintained on our Wiki. The only odd one out is probably the interaction with our user base, which faithfully continues to revolve around our newsgroups at news.povray.org (also accessible via our web interface). [Less]

As an alternative to POV-Ray's inbuilt scene description language, Laurent Evian has developed the free "Pycao" tool to describe scenes using the Python language. For details, see Laurent's website.

We've become aware that since late November some visitors in the Scandinavian region have been unable to access povray.org and its related sites via their broadband connection, but find that when using a mobile connection the site works fine. ... [More] This issue affects visitors whose ISP's rely on TeliaSonera for transit or routing information (while there may be other backbone providers affected, we have not received examples other than Telia). Basically Telia are not receiving (or not accepting, we are not sure which) routing information for the network that povray.org is hosted on (203.29.75.0/24, advertised on AS6062). At this point the matter is out of our hands as it involves backbone providers and how they exchange BGP routing information. The issue has been brought to the attention of providers in both the USA (where our network is hosted) and Sweden, and we can only wait to see if or when they will resolve it. Please also note that affected visitors will probably not be able to successfully email us regarding the issue if they use their ISP-provided email accounts as these will generally use the same routing tables as used for general web browsing. Using GMail or other non-ISP-specific services ought to work. We will update this post as more information becomes available. [Less]

We've become aware that since late November some visitors in the Scandinavian region have been unable to access povray.org and its related sites via their broadband connection, but find that when using a mobile connection the site works fine. ... [More] This issue affects visitors whose ISP's rely on TeliaSonera for transit or routing information (while there may be other backbone providers affected, we have not received examples other than Telia). Basically Telia are not receiving (or not accepting, we are not sure which) routing information for the network that povray.org is hosted on (203.29.75.0/24, advertised on AS6062). At this point the matter is out of our hands as it involves backbone providers and how they exchange BGP routing information. The issue has been brought to the attention of providers in both the USA (where our network is hosted) and Sweden, and we can only wait to see if or when they will resolve it. Please also note that affected visitors will probably not be able to successfully email us regarding the issue if they use their ISP-provided email accounts as these will generally use the same routing tables as used for general web browsing. Using GMail or other non-ISP-specific services ought to work. We will update this post as more information becomes available. [Less]

Former POV-Ray developer and team coordinator Chris Young has been working with 3D printing in recent times and wanted to be able to convert a POV-Ray scene into something that he could touch & feel. This isn't as easy as it sounds since POV-Ray ... [More] works with solids but consumer 3D printers expect triangle meshes. He has written a blog post explaining the issue and how he approached it, and another interesting and quite detailed post explaining the process he used to get from .POV to .STL. Chris has made his pov2mesh code available on GitHub under the Creative Commons license. [Less]

Epspline (as in Edit-Povray-SPLINE) is a utility for POV-Ray users: a simple 2D graphical editor of lathe and prism objects. Visit the website for download links, and a few samples.