I was listening to FLOSS weekly with the guy who actually created POV Ray (persistence of vision raytracer). It was amazing to listen to because, I along time ago use to run it on my old Atari ST. At the time I never had access to anything else, and frankly everything else was simply crap in when compared to PovRay's efforts. I believe there were all of about 4 3D rendering programs on the Atari 16bit platform and to be honest the ability to write images and animations using a simple notepad application was insane but ever so useful at the time. After a long while I built my first PC which was a 233mhz beasty and PovRay was one of those benchmark software which I used to prove to myself the investment. I could only dream how fast it would be to render scenes on my current workstation and laptop.
The author of POV Ray in the podcast talks about how he made the software freeware and wrote a basic license saying your welcome to modify it but if you do make a change please send it back to the author. This was before the word open source was around and even before the web had taken hold, so POV Ray was distributed on floppy discs, CDs and BBS. It was written before licenses like BSD, GPL and Apache were common, although PovRay 4 is going to be rewritten under the GPL 3 license.
PovRay isn't dead actually there starting to add some well needed features like native mutliprocessor support. In the past you would specify a part of the final image to do on one machine/cpu and the other bit on the other machine/cpu. This may sound very bizarre for a heavy duty raytracing engine but when you had a room full of computers like we sometimes had at college, it meant we could run renders of sizes like 1600×1200 and split the picture up into 4 pieces of 800×600, which were then run over 4x Pentium P133 machines.
The other thing I loved about PovRay was its realism, for year and years I argued that 3Dstudiomax, Lightwave, etc's results were poor compared to PovRay. The main reason was that this applications use to render results not raytrace them. This was why PovRay took so long to render scenes, like the one above. But for the hardcore, PovRay also had true Radiosity support
Actual writing PovRay scenes involves picturing in your mind 3D space and then mapping things based on that space. We use to graph things out on a graph paper and then translate it into C like syntax. It sounds more difficult that it actually is and before long your up and going. I just wish I could find some of my old scenes. Oh the language is a turing-complete language that supports macros and loops. So you can most of the time program effects using maths and logic that by hand.
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