Your first scene
- Lights, camera, action!
- Your most basic scenes will consist of a light source, a camera, and an object. Raytracers such as POV-Ray work by sending “rays” from the camera and following the “rays” through reflection, refraction, and absorption until the rays reach a light source or are lost in shadow. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytracing for a more detailed explanation of what raytracing is. Now, let’s create our first simple scene.
- Your first scene: Camera!
- Our camera looks a lot like our light source.
- Your first scene: Action!
- Now comes the moment of truth. We’re going to put something in our scene. At the center of the universe, we’re going to put a big sphere.
- Render the scene
- Your scene should now have all three sections: lights, camera, and object.
- Your first scene: Settings
- You have several settings for what POV-Ray does while it renders. On Mac OS X, you can find the settings for your scene under the “Edit” menu. There are three important sections to the settings: the Scene, Quality, and Output panes.
- Include files
- I hope I haven’t scared you with all these numbers because, at least for some of them, there is an easier way. POV-Ray comes with several files that contain useful objects and numbers. One of those files will let you specify your colors in English rather than as a series of red, green, and blue numbers.
- The plane truth
- There are two basic kinds of objects in POV-Ray: objects that have a definite end, and objects that go on forever. POV-Ray calls these finite objects and infinite objects. A sphere is a finite object. A plane is an infinite one. Let’s add a plane to our scene.
- Ambient light
- If you’ve been paying attention to the description of raytracing, you might be asking why the plane casts a shadow onto a visible sphere. The light source is above the plane. The plane goes on to infinity in the x and z directions. How does any light get below the plane? We shouldn’t be able to see the lower half of the sphere at all.
