POV-Ray Resources

Official POV-Ray Stuff

POV-Ray is a freeware raytracer. You can find it here, compiled for various platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux. Source code is available as are many POV-Ray related resources.

SonOfSofaman's POV-Ray Tutorial

What is POV-Ray?

Getting started

SonOfSofaman's POV-Ray Reference

There are three elements of a ray-traced scene that one must become familiar with: geometry, lighting and textures.

Geometry
The shape of the objects in a POV-Ray scene are defined using various geometrical constructs. Learn about primitives and Constructive Solid Geometry on these pages.

Lighting
When I actually learn how to do lighting well, I'll add what I've learned here.

Textures
The appearance of an object in a POV-Ray scene is determined in part by its texture definition. Producing realistic looking objects requires an understanding of each of the many aspects of texture definitions. It is the goal of this section to demonstrate each of those aspects.