All About POV Ray GS

(a public domain beta release)

by Charles T. 'Dr. Tom' Turley

Imagine the novel concept of being able to do exotic 3D raytracing and rendering, generating rich and vibrant dimensional textures and backgroups in 256 colors, with the same results and detailed programming skills that all the graphics experts on those other computers can now do! Well, here and now presented as a shell exe. app. you can do it on your IIGS. Ported to the IIGS and released (with the src. codes) as a public domain beta -> ENTER -> POV Ray GS.


POV (Persistence of Vision) Ray has been one of the most useful and popular 3D raytracing, rendering and texture generator programs for a long time now - on all of the major computers platforms.

POV Ray was originally ported to the IIGS by Jean Pierre Charpenter - late in the year - 1995, as an exe. shell application. Having an original letter of authority from the port author - Jean Pierre Charpenter, allowing me the right to do whatever I wish with any of his Apple II and/or IIGS programs, today (3-14-97) I'm releasing the POV Ray GS port and src. codes for same to the public domain. The current beta1 release is available in Shrinkit GS archives, as both .BXY and .SHK, should you care to download and try working with it.

POV.GSb1.BXY or pov.exe.SHK .

This beta1 release is a real 'RAM HOG', requiring 6 to 7 MB's of free RAM to launch/function and it's still rather buggy. Perhaps somebody will have the time, motivation and skill to do some form of nice update, enhancements and improvements with the program.

POV Ray FAQ and DOCS

Nobody has yet composed any formal documentation or manual for the POV Ray GS beta1 release. The POV Ray GS archive file contains the basics (in file formats and text) to help you understand what it can do. However, should you care to review the links; - 'Official POV Ray User's Documentation and manual' for all computer platforms (the most current release) and/or the FAQ link for all raytracing programs with POV Ray inclusions - they can both give you virtually every possible outline, fact, technique and concept for the program you might ever wish to know, to help as your guide and review with any efforts you might attempt with the POV Ray GS beta1 release.

Raytracing Frequently Asked Questions

Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray (POV) User's Documentation and most current release

Here's some proposed thoughts for consideration and development of what POV Ray GS might be upgraded to do - if some skilled IIGS programmer decided to do it; a SS (Second Sight card compatible) enhanced GUI - desktop application, work toward a fast, bug-reduced, System 6 aware rendering environment that could at least export TIFF or 3200 format images or RAW data for use by anyone who wants it, work toward import filter extensions (and format specs) whereby other 3D apps (on any platform) could send a model into POV GS with view and lighting parameters intact (3rd party applications could use this mechanism to import 3D DXF files).

If you have the time, talent and motivation to work with the programs update and development, then please feel free to download the POV Ray GS src. codes for the IIGS beta1 release. To download the src. code archive file -> CLICK HERE .

By helping with the develop this program for the IIGS - to its full potentials, you'll be doing the entire IIGS world a big favor.


Emails: turley@grin.net (or) owsw@aol.com

I can also be reached by snail mail or voice - see below.

115 Santa Clara St.
Brisbane, CA 94005-1736

Voice Tel. (415) 468-1609


Additional Major Links of interest for the POV-Ray program

The Persistance of Vision Ray Tracer (POV-Ray) is an all-round excellent package, but there are two things that particularly make it stand out above the rest of the crowd; it's free, and the source is distributed so you can compile it on virtually any platform. It's without doubt the most used package among the comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing crowd and well worth checking out if you haven't already.

POV-Ray is based on David Buck's original ray tracer.
With respect to the other computer platforms, the latest version currently available is near.

See http://www.povray.org/ for more information.

These are the official distribution sites for POV-Ray.

ftp://ftp.povray.org/
[the main site in North America.]

ftp://uniwa.uwa.edu.au/pub/povray/
[for the Soutern Hemisphere]

There is also a growing list of sites that mirror all or part of ftp.povray.org (see - FTP Sites, Web Sites, Bulletin Boards, etc.).

Besides the IIGS beta1 release and src. code archives available from this page, there are also official executables available for Amiga, Linux, and MacOS, as well as unofficial executables for MacPPC, DEC Alpha, DEC OSF, HP, FreeBSD, SGI, RS/6000, and SunOS.

If your system isn't in this list, it's recommended that you use the generic Unix sources for compiling POV-Ray. You can also find the above archives packaged in different formats or binaries for other platforms.

If you have access to several networked computers and a compiler, it is possible to have POV-Ray render using multiple CPUs using the PVM system of distributed computing.

More information is at: http://www mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/povray/pvmpov.html

There is a large collection of software related to POV-Ray available on the Raytrace! CD-ROM from Walnut Creek. This includes modellers, viewers, utility programs, scene files, and rendered images.

You can have a look at almost the whole contents of the CD-ROM at: http://www.povray.org/pov-cdrom/

An extensive links page to all WWW sites that deal with POV Ray, in any form or manner of value is available HERE!


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