I installed POV Ray and POV Lab on my computer, ran the program and I get a DOS window with a bunch of esoteric (to me) information on the screen. Did I get the right program? Is there one that runs in a Windows format similar to 3DC?



Thanks for any help, y'all!

Richard T.

There is a POV for windows. 3.6 now I think.

I figured I should offer you more of an explanation to POV. I'm not sure if your familiar with it at all or not so please excuse me if I am being too simplistic. POV is a raytracing program, that works actually as a code editor. In other words, you wont have the same type of user interface as you do in 3DC. You wont have your exported model sitting in front of you that you can move, change and so on. Basically you'll have a scene in verbose code. Everything in the scene is defined and have they're parameters. ( location on the x,y,z grid, size, color, vectors, effects...etc.) It's actually a very easy code to learn, with some rules to follow, but everything you need to know to use it is in POV itself. very good documentation and more examples then you'll be able to look at in a day. So, when you first open POV, all you'll have is a page editor with some info on the program. If you exported a scene from 3DC into POV format, you'll have to go to "open", find your scene, click on it, it will open in POV in coded form. Now, you can hit "run" and it should render. What I do from there gets fun. I start exchanging things, ( lights, textures, finishes, etc.) and see what I can get. You can also find lots of help in the POV news groups and from hundreds of POV artists. ( check out the IRTC competetions!!! Unbelievable work!!)

You're right, other than knowing it's a raytracing program, I know nothing about it. Thanks very much for your reply, I'll look at it again and if I have any questions, I'll post them here.

Richard T.

Richard,
If you export models from 3DC over to PovRay, it can be quite a bit easier to learn about the code, simply because the export will do a lot of it for you, then you just make whatever adjustments you need. It can be a lot of fun.

If I might suggest, make sure you place your model(object) at 0, 0, 0 in the 3DC position coordinates(properties) area before exporting, if possible. Then place camera, lights, etc. accordingly. I find it much easier to move or manipulate objects this way once in POV. Hope this is of some help.

Les

Hi Les,

Thanks for the pointers, I really appreciate that. I reckon I need to go in there and look at everything before I start using it.

Richard

Hi Richard,

Les was right. I should have mentioned that its a good thing to start off with your model at 0,0,0 so you wont have to play hide and seek to find everything when you first look at your model in POV. Also, I have found it extremely useful to have everything "named" in the hierarchy so that in POV you have named objects you can "search" to instead of trying to figure which one of a dozen shperes, cubes, and such is the one you want when your changing things.Have fun....