POV-Ray 3.7 released, now under AGPL license
The POV-Ray renderer team has released version 3.7. It features an insanely long list of changes, but the biggest change is the new license: POV-Ray is now AGPL and finally officially Free software.
POV-Ray was the first renderer I ever used and I love to see how well it works together with Blender these days – check out their integration add-on.
Maurice Raybaud writes:At last, you can grab the official 3.7 POV-Ray release here (for linux builds, see our wiki until repositories add it)
New licence notice: Starting with version 3.7, POV-Ray is released under the AGPL3 (or later) license and thus is Free Software according to the FSF definition.
Full source code is available, allowing users to build their own versions and for developers to incorporate portions or all of the POV-Ray source into their own software provided it is distributed under a compatible license (for example, the AGPL3 or – at their option – any later version). The POV-Ray developers also provide officially-supported binaries for selected platforms (currently only Microsoft Windows, but expected to include OS X shortly).
Link
To be fair, I suppose the standard definition of “Free/Libre” was still a bit novel when this project was starting out. These days, though, there is no excuse for not understanding the concept.
I wonder when Gnuplot will see the light?
I remember first using PovRay almost 25 years ago (eek!) – rendering a scene would take an entire night and more often than once, I found that I had forgotten to include a lamp :)
Rendering a good scene can still take an entire night. :)
True. Mine were more like a chess board with some pieces though :)
When I was at University (1979-85), we could only dream of getting decent hardware for doing fancy computer graphics. The best we had access to were Tektronix 4006 and 4010 storage-tube terminals. Oh, and then there was a DEC “GIGI” (VK100) terminal with built-in Microsoft BASIC. I remember implementing polygon scanline conversion algorithms that were sending pixel-by-pixel data down a 9600bps serial line.
For some history fun, check out the VintageCG account on YouTube.
Ah yes, but universities always had old crap :) At the time I was forced to learn how to work on a mainframe I already had an Amiga 500 at home!
The gear wasn’t all crap. A couple of gifted students (not me) were hand-picked by a lecturer for a special project involving an ICL PERQ—A4 bitmapped screen, only black-and-white, but still swoonworthy material for those days.
:-D
Same here. I remember downloading some chessboard scene from a bbs and forgetting to also download the wood textures. This was one a 386 dx 40 with 4 MB of internal memory, so it took a while to figure out what was wrong with the scene. This must have been more than 20 years ago.
It’s incredible that a software I used on my Amiga in the late 80’s is still actively maintained !
Indeed! It would be interesting to see a comparison of open source renders some day and see how it holds up.
so’s lightwave…
12-13 years ago I was learning POV-Ray when I found Blender. I’m so glad to see POV-Ray is still being developed and maintained.
Amazing. My first scene was in POV-Ray. I remember it well. Three reflective balls (red, green, blue) on a checkerboard plane with a fourth, fully reflective ball on top. All described in a text file. Had to work out the math to put the center of the balls all in the correct location with no overlap. Today, having a graphic interface makes things so much easier. I will not go back to the text files for anything.
Haha, I still remember doing that, too! I even drew out my scenes on paper first before coding the scripts. SO much work!
Oh, while I’m on the topic, did anyone here ever write a ray tracer in Basic? :)
I’ve never used PovRay but I’ve heard the lore:) Is it worth using, I mean as a modern renderer? Can it be used for animation? What are the render times like when compared to other render engines?
POV-Ray 3.6 was substandard, though quite similar to Blender Internal then, except slower but it had caustics already. 3.7 is catching up quickly. Not modern as V-Ray type, because configuration time is always longer and approach to materials is oldschool. But it’s mature. the workflow is more Mental Ray and actually has the potential towards (simpler than) Renderman like Pipelines as well because of its easy to learn scene description language and non mesh geometry. It even has a Real Time Rendering mode (+RTR command line option) that we had no time to implement in Blender’s exporter. If any good Python dev is willing to help it would be nice. Contact me through Blenderartists.org for any help or information.
For some odd reason, the documentation remains under a non-Free licence: CC-BY-NC-SA.
hmmmm