{"id":269,"date":"2008-02-14T12:18:37","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T17:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=269"},"modified":"2008-02-14T12:18:37","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T17:18:37","slug":"fun-with-ray-tracing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=269","title":{"rendered":"Fun With Ray Tracing"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago one of the podcasts I subscribe to (FLOSS Weekly<\/em>) had a episode about a ray tracing program called POV-Ray<\/a>. The people being interviewed in that podcast were so enthusiastic about their software that I decided to give it a try.<\/p>\n

It’s a free, open source product and I found it has good documentation too. Anyway, I’ve been playing with it for a while, mostly going through the tutorial and doing the examples. Finally I decided to try something original and here is the result.<\/p>\n

\"Rocket\"<\/p>\n

This is a very simple image though I hope to embellish it as I learn more about the program and how to use it.<\/p>\n

The great thing about POV-Ray (at least to me) is that it is all done with software and written in a “scene description language<\/em>.” It’s very much like programming in any other language except that the output is rendered<\/em> into an image. I’ve tried creating images from scratch using Photoshop <\/em>or other image editors but I never could get the hang of that. With this I can work in a way I am familiar with.<\/p>\n

All the images created are 3-dimensional and it’s easy to change the viewpoint and lighting to get the best looking results. Also there are many pre-defined elements such as the background stars and the planet’s sky in my little example.<\/p>\n

Anyway, if any of you are interested, you can download the program for most OS’s (Windows, Mac, Linux and others) and just play around with it. It comes with a lot of pre-coded examples that you can have fun with. If you want to listen to the podcast that got me hooked you can download it here<\/a>. It is an MP3 about 32MB in size.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago one of the podcasts I subscribe to (FLOSS Weekly) had a episode about a ray tracing program called POV-Ray. The people being interviewed in that podcast were so enthusiastic about their software that I decided to give it a try. It’s a free, open source product and I found it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-around-the-house","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}