DINO and POVray Tutorial

The Persistance of Vision Raytracer, or just POVray, is a powerful raytracing package, which is freely available and runs on all major platforms. Being a raytracer, it allows the creation of complex three dimensional scenes with stunning realism and incredible artistic beauty, achieving effects that a realtime 3D rendering system cannot or only with difficulty achieve. The increase in quality is payed by a decrease in rendering time. A single image can take minutes or hours to render, and raytracing is therefore not suited for interactive work.

DINO can generate a POVray scene from its current objects. This scene can be improved, modified, adjusted and tweaked with all the myriads of options POVray has to offer. This tutorial attempts to introduce the interested DINO user into the amazing possibilities offered by POVray. For a complete treatment, please consult the POVray manual and the numerous tutorials found on the POVray homepage.

A patch to improve POVrays usability for scientific visualization (by adding color interpolation between triangle vertices) is available here.

In a nutshell: A POVray scene is exported from DINO, resulting in two files: a .pov file and a .inc file. The latter is usually quite large and contains the descriptions of all 3D primitives that make up the scene. The former file contains all user editable parameters: scene related settings (camera, light sources, background and depth effect) and - for each object - the material settings.

It is easy to get carried away with the infinite number of possible adjustments offered by POVray. One should attempt nevertheless to maintain a careful balance between artistic ambition and scientific message. The beauty of an image can always be improved, its scientific content not.