Persistence of Text

What is Persistence of Vision?

Persistence of Vision is a very cool three dimensional image creator that you control through text statements rather than a graphical user interface. It is extremely powerful and versatile, but can take some learning. I’m going to attempt to help the learning curve along, and I’ll also provide a few important links for Macintosh users of POV.

Tutorials

The tutorial that comes with POV is actually quite good, and you should read over it. I’m going to try and expand on it by explaining some of the things I’ve done. If you aren’t a POV expert, don’t worry: neither am I. Most of the stuff you see here are my beginning attempts. I’m going to try to make it easier for you than it was for me!

Images on the Web: Discussion of image formats for the web, with a focus on jpeg, gif, png, and QuickTime. These are the major image formats that you will use for web images.
Persistence of Vision Macintosh Basics: This tutorial will get you acquainted with the most important preferences and menu items in Persistence of Vision for the Mac, including editing your scene file and creating animations.
Persistence of Vision Basics: The basics of ray-tracing three-dimensional images with Persistence of Vision. Learn about cameras, light sources, and how to move objects around in your POV scenes.
Spent Bullet Casing: Use lathes, constructive solid geometry, text, cylinders, and superellipsoids to create a spent bullet casing from a .40 S&W using Persistence of Vision.
Text logo with a super-imposed image: Use constructive solid geometry and image maps to create a text logo from photographs or other images.
Six-Sided Dice: Use the superellipsoid and a little bit of CSG to create a very realistic six-sided die. The superellipsoid lets you create rounded boxes in your Persistence of Vision scenes.
Scripting Persistence of Vision: POV’s built-in scripting feature allows you to both simplify your scene creation and make much more complex scenes. Using scripting to make complex and redundant three dimensional objects.
POV is Trig: If you understand triangles and their functions, you can more easily determine where rotated objects end up. Use trigonometry to calculate lengths when you rotate objects in Persistence of Vision.
Ten-sided dice: The intersection of multiple shapes is often one of the least understood features of constructive solid geometry. Here we’ll create a ten-sided die using the intersection of planes.
Simple Photorealism using Persistence of Vision: Simple photorealism for people who can’t draw. This tutorial guides you through using the free Persistence of Vision ray-tracer. You’ll create a planet, with rings and an orbiting moon set against a starry background.
Why text?: Why the text interface to Persistence of Vision is extremely important.

More Information

Fraise: Fraise is the successor to the great text editor Smultron. It’s an easy-to-use, powerful, free, text editor with tabs, split windows, syntax coloring, and more.
GIMP: The GIMP image manipulation program is one of the best free software packages of any kind. Fully multi-platform, the GIMP “is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction”.
GraphicConverter: GraphicConverter allows you to take pictures from just about any source and turn them into gifs or jpegs that you can use on the net. You can modify them in numerous ways, and even create them from scratch. If you’re a programmer, you can create your own ‘plug ins’. It supports animated GIFs, quicktime movies, and the PNG graphic format. It can convert between most graphic formats you are ever likely to run across—even the old TRS-80 graphics.
Legos for Persistence of Vision: This is very cool stuff: lego blocks for Persistence of Vision. You can now put lego creations into your ray-traced scenes! Almost as fun as the original.
Mondfarilo: Probably the most useful object editor for the Macintosh; it handles blobs and lathes as well as the simpler shapes.
Official POV-Ray Macintosh Page: Command central for Persistence of Vision/Macintosh. Look here for the latest updates, as well as links to most of the tools you’ll want for Persistence of Vision on the Mac.
POV-Ray: POV-Ray is a ray-tracing program for Macintosh, Unix, DOS, and Windows. It is very powerful, full-featured, reliable, and free. It also uses a “programmer-style” interface rather than a graphical one. The tutorial that comes with it is well-written, so it’s worth a look .Persistence of Vision is very useful for those of us who like to automate our image creation. It uses a simple scripting language to build up complex 3-dimensional imagery.
TTConverter 1.5: TTConverter converts Windows truetype fonts to Mac and vice versa. It’s the other way around that you’ll find useful in POV: you need to convert your Truetype fonts to text format before POV can use them. (I’m not sure why, but this software has disappeared from all the major download sites. It is the only font conversion software I’ve seen that goes both ways and that allows drag and drop.)

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Persistence of Text last modified July 10th, 2011.