Sunday, August 7, 2016

POV-Ray - old but gold

I wanted to render some 3D images recently. I downloaded SketchUp and Blender and did some quick googling.

Both packages look really interesting but they look as if they are primarily GUI-based. I realize that's what most people probably want but I needed to render a scene that contains thousands of objects. I didn't want to have to add these into my scene one at a time.

I'm sure somebody will explain how to create complex scenes in SketchUp and Blender (please write a comment if you do) but I decided to go back to POV-Ray. It's old (the last release was in 2013) but it's very functional. I used MATLAB to create my scene in the POV-Ray format (*.pov) and then rendered the image using the POV-Ray engine.

I'll explain how I automated the process in the next few posts and created 'fly-through movies' with a single click but, for now, here's a quick example of the sort of image I was able to generate.

I think it's pretty cool.


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