P-O-V R-A-Y! What does that spell...

...Well, it spells POV-Ray. POV-Ray is a raytracer, which is a program that makes realistic looking images. For each pixel, POV-Ray traces a ray of light though the scene to find out what the pixel should look like. This seems simple, but if you consider that each object can reflect light, or let light pass though it, the calculations get rather complex. Luckily, with POV-Ray, you don't have to worry about the technical details. All you have to do is define a scene, and POV-Ray will to all the nasty number chrunching.

The first scene is of a billboard with the mandelbrot image on it. Most of the light comes from the two spotlights in the cones on top of the billboard, but there is a bit of ambient light to light things up a bit. Unfortunately, there is a little problem with the shadows, but we haven't been able to fix it yet.

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The second scene simulates a landscape using a height field, which is where the value of each pixel of a different computer image is used to calculate the height of a point on the height map. We moved the light source from behind the camera to in front of the camera to simulate the passing of time from sunrise to sunset.

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The third scence is that of a hall illuminated by a slightly yellow light on the ceiling. It looks like the hall goes on for a long time, but there are two nearly perfectly reflecting mirrors on both ends of a small section of the hallway, creating the illusion that the hallway is much longer than it actually is.

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Last Updated: June 10, 1998
Owner: Sean Dobbs
Email: sdobbs@lan.tjhsst.edu