Description

POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision RAYtracer) is a high-quality tool for creating three-dimensional graphics. Raytraced images are publication-quality and 'photo-realistic'.

Version

3.6.1

How to Use

The default version of Povray is v3.6 (/usr/local/bin/povray, or /usr/local/bin/povray-3.6). The older version, v3.1, is also available in /usr/local/bin/povray-3.1.

For extremely large images that will take several hours to render, a parallelized version of POV-Ray on Biowulf should be used.

By default, POV-Ray attempts to display the image as it is being rendered to the screen. This feature requires an X-Windows connection. To disable the display, you must include -D in the POV-Ray command line.

Sample session: (User input in bold, click here for the 1asy.pov input file)

<helix-p4>% povray -i 1asy.pov +h542 +w456 -D
Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray Tracer Version 3.6.1 (g++ 3.4.1 @
 i686-pc-linux-gnu)
This is an official version prepared by the POV-Ray Team. See the
 documentation on how to contact the authors or visit us on the
 internet at http://www.povray.org/.
POV-Ray is based on DKBTrace 2.12 by David K. Buck & Aaron A. Collins
Copyright 1991-2003 Persistence of Vision Team
Copyright 2003-2004 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.

Primary POV-Ray 3.5/3.6 Developers: (Alphabetically)
  Chris Cason         Thorsten Froehlich  Nathan Kopp         Ron Parker

Contributing Authors: (Alphabetically)
  Steve Anger         Eric Barish         Dieter Bayer        Steve A.
Bennett
  David K. Buck       Nicolas Calimet     Aaron A. Collins    Chris Dailey
  Steve Demlow        Andreas Dilger      Alexander Enzmann   Dan Farmer
  Mark Gordon         Christoph Hormann   Mike Hough          Chris Huff
  Kari Kivisalo       Lutz Kretzschmar    Jochen Lippert      Pascal
Massimino
  Jim McElhiney       Douglas Muir        Juha Nieminen       Bill Pulver
  Eduard Schwan       Wlodzimierz Skiba   Robert Skinner      Yvo
Smellenbergh
  Zsolt Szalavari     Scott Taylor        Massimo Valentini   Timothy
Wegner
  Drew Wells          Chris Young

Other contributors are listed in the documentation.

Support libraries used by POV-Ray:
  ZLib 1.2.1, Copyright 1995-1998 Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler
  LibPNG 1.2.5, Copyright 1998-2002 Glenn Randers-Pehrson
  LibJPEG 6b, Copyright 1998 Thomas G. Lane
  LibTIFF 3.6.1, Copyright 1988-1997 Sam Leffler, 1991-1997 SGI
Redirecting Options
  All Streams to console..........On
  Debug Stream to console.........On
  Fatal Stream to console.........On
  Render Stream to console........On
  Statistics Stream to console....On
  Warning Stream to console.......On
Parsing Options
  Input file: 1ASY.pov (compatible to version 3.61)
  Remove bounds........On
  Split unions.........Off
  Library paths:
    /usr/local/share/povray-3.6
    /usr/local/share/povray-3.6/ini
    /usr/local/share/povray-3.6/include
Output Options
  Image resolution 456 by 542 (rows 1 to 542, columns 1 to 456).
  Output file: /data4/c/hooverdm/povray/from_VMD/1ASY/1ASY.png, 24 bpp PNG
  Graphic display......Off
  Mosaic preview.......Off
  CPU usage histogram..Off
  Continued trace......Off
Tracing Options
  Quality:  9
  Bounding boxes.......On   Bounding threshold: 3
  Light Buffer.........On
  Vista Buffer.........On   Draw Vista Buffer....Off
  Antialiasing.........Off
  Clock value:    0.000  (Animation off)

  0:00:01 Parsing 1618K tokens
  0:00:01 Creating bounding slabs
  0:00:01 Creating vista buffer
  0:00:01 Creating light buffers 1789K tokens
Scene Statistics
  Finite objects:        15024
  Infinite objects:          0
  Light sources:             2
  Total:                 15026

  0:00:03 Rendering line 415 of 542
  0:00:03 Done Tracing
Render Statistics
Image Resolution 456 x 542
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pixels:           247152   Samples:          247152   Smpls/Pxl: 1.00
Rays:             247152   Saved:                 0   Max Level: 1/5
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray->Shape Intersection          Tests       Succeeded  Percentage
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cone/Cylinder                   309576           99505     32.14
Sphere                         2344092         1525093     65.06
Bounding Box                  50776792        16323413     32.15
Vista Buffer                  10941485         6254088     57.16
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Calls to Noise:                   0   Calls to DNoise:              10
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shadow Ray Tests:            835730   Succeeded:                     0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smallest Alloc:                   9 bytes
Largest  Alloc:              120200 bytes
Peak memory used:          13633356 bytes
Total Scene Processing Times
  Parse Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  1 seconds (1 seconds)
  Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes  0 seconds (0 seconds)
  Render Time:   0 hours  0 minutes  3 seconds (3 seconds)
  Total Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  4 seconds (4 seconds)

<helix-p4>% convert 1asy.png 1asy.jpg

<helix-p4>% display 1asy.jpg

Documentation

For a simple help menu, type povray -h. For a more extensive help page, type man povray.

Povray documentation