<story><title>Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)</title><url>https://github.com/spcask/pov-ray-tracing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erjiang</author><text>Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in &lt;i&gt;open source&lt;/i&gt; 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically.&lt;p&gt;Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender&amp;#x27;s Cycle renderer now.&lt;p&gt;The big change is that everyone has moved to &amp;quot;physically based rendering&amp;quot; that do path-tracing for propagating light through a scene. Old-school raytracing cannot know how light indirectly bounces off a wall, for example, leading to artificial-looking shadows and flat lighting.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, anyone interested in making neat little 3D scenes like in this GitHub should try out Blender - it&amp;#x27;s shockingly easy to make realistic renders compared to several years ago.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Blender&amp;#x27;s Cycles rendering engine seems to have been included with Blender since 2011. POV-Ray probably represents 2000s-era tech, although I think it can do more than what&amp;#x27;s demonstrated in this post.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TylerE</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s rather unfair to POV-Ray. These are hardly representative of what it&amp;#x27;s capable of.&lt;p&gt;Look through the old IRTC archives, for instance: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ftp.irtc.org&amp;#x2F;stills&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ftp.irtc.org&amp;#x2F;stills&amp;#x2F;index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;People were doing stuff like this (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;oz.irtc.org&amp;#x2F;ftp&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;stills&amp;#x2F;1999-04-30&amp;#x2F;13hystri.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;oz.irtc.org&amp;#x2F;ftp&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;stills&amp;#x2F;1999-04-30&amp;#x2F;13hystri.jpg&lt;/a&gt;) in 1999.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)</title><url>https://github.com/spcask/pov-ray-tracing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erjiang</author><text>Wow, the state of the art in 3D rendering has changed dramatically. The state of the art in &lt;i&gt;open source&lt;/i&gt; 3D rendering has changed even more dramatically.&lt;p&gt;Compare these screenshots from 2013 (although I think POV-Ray was looking pretty dated by then) to renders that come out of Blender&amp;#x27;s Cycle renderer now.&lt;p&gt;The big change is that everyone has moved to &amp;quot;physically based rendering&amp;quot; that do path-tracing for propagating light through a scene. Old-school raytracing cannot know how light indirectly bounces off a wall, for example, leading to artificial-looking shadows and flat lighting.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, anyone interested in making neat little 3D scenes like in this GitHub should try out Blender - it&amp;#x27;s shockingly easy to make realistic renders compared to several years ago.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Blender&amp;#x27;s Cycles rendering engine seems to have been included with Blender since 2011. POV-Ray probably represents 2000s-era tech, although I think it can do more than what&amp;#x27;s demonstrated in this post.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>minxomat</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s like saying Flatland (the movie) was representative of the animation tech at the time.&lt;p&gt;Remember that The Third and The Seventh was done by a single person in 2009, and is entirely modeled and rendered with tech available back then: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;7809605&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;7809605&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>