Why Povray is great.
A short demonstration of Povray, the open source ray tracer. This is a bit of an advertisement for a rather ancient but fantastic and reliable classic software. Similarly as the text processor TeX, it is an open source, error free, robust and trusty software. I use it since more than 20 years and what I appreciate is that what I wrote then, still runs. I show some examples like how other programs (C or mathematica can generate povray files) or how Povray rerenders a movie. In a second part, some pictures of leading povray artists are shown (all these pictures were rerendered from open source files).
Links:
Some of the examples of leading povray artists were featured on this page:
http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/te...
Some source code is available on
http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/va...
Website of two great povray artists:
http://www.oyonale.com/ (Gilles Tran)
http://www.ignorancia.org/ ( Jaime Vives Piqueres )