[PLUG] POVray on Ubuntu Hardy

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Thu Jul 9 22:51:27 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 01:19:31PM -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> Can someone point me to where the tutorial is put on Hardy?
> 
> The Googling I've done says to look in
> 
> /usr/local/share/doc/povray-3.6/html
> 
> for the POVray tutorial. I installed POVray using the Synaptic Package 
> Manager, but I get an error message when I try to go to the 
> /usr/local/share/doc directory.

I suggest you download the pdf documents from the POVray website;
easier to read and navigate, IMHO .

ftp://ftp.povray.org/pub/povray/Official/Documentation/povdoc-3.6.1-us-pdf.zip

This contains both the 420 page reference manual and the 276
page tutorial.  There are also Tex and PS versions in that same
directory.  

Note that a lot of the tutorial examples are code fragments buried
in the text, not available online AFAIK.   So, you get to do copy
and paste, and often figure out the lights and camera yourself.

I just started playing with POVray this week, and will be making
a heck of a lot of POVray output over the next month.  Perhaps
we ought to team together to solve problems and learn things.


Other POVray notes:

In many cases it is easier to learn specific things by looking at
other people's .pov and .ini files, and the drawings that they make.
Then tweak the parameters and see what happens.

Realism is costly.  The rendering time difference between
"understandable" and "photorealistic" can be seconds to days. 
Much of the POVray community seems committed to the latter, so
they will suggest things like Rayleigh atmospheric scattering 
media to get pictures Just Right, even though that is enormously
more costly (hours) than absorption and emission (seconds).  OTOH,
they make some beautiful pictures ...

Finally, POVray doesn't make animations directly - just a sequence
of numerically ordered images you can turn into an animation with
other tools.  I make SWF movies for the web with the open source
SWFTOOLS.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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