DINO and POVray Tutorial

The material of an object can be separated into its surface properties, the texture, and its inside, the interior. Here we will only touch upon the texture, which can be split into three parts: pigment, normal and finish.

Although the pigment can be much more, it is easiest to think about it as the color of the surface. It consists of five parts: the red, green and blue component as well as a transparency and filter value. The first three are usually predefined from DINO, and their usage in POVray can be a little complicated. The fourth and fifth parameters are present as variables and they are further discussed here. The pigment statement in the texture declaration is just a placeholder and should not be modified. There are two exceptions to this:

The contour object of the scalar field dataset uses this pigment statement to define its color, filter and transmit value.
The -nocolor option during scene export will make this pigment statement active.

Some detail is presented on the finish and the normal modifiers as well as their combined effect.

It is of course possible to utilize predefined settings from the POVray distribution or other sources. The predefined textures sections has more on that.