News Archive

Here in the US, it's the 4th of July - the founding of our country. I celebrated by, among other things, finishing up the CSG Chess Set article. Enjoy. The rest of the celebration will be fireworks and (unfortunately) long-winded speaches by politicians. Can't win 'em all. Also, since the March-April IRTC winners are posted, I'm working on a matching IRTC Watch write-up.

And, from lurking the newsgroups:

• Bill Pragnell has posted the latest edition of his Knotworld and it's cool.
• Tail Kinker has posted images of several Star Trek models from the original TV series. All were created in JPatch.
• The May-June IRTC round just ended. It looks like the July-August topic is "From Rubbage Bin to Junkyard". This could be interesting

Another article's been finish, the one on making a coffee cup in JPatch. Check it out as JPatch is one of those easy-to-learn modelers that's Povray friendly. Beyond that, I've got a chess-set tutorial that's needing the finishing touches and I'll start working on the March/April IRTC Watch as soon the voting results are published (yes, I am biased toward the winners).

Beyond that, Christoph Hormann has started a 5 Gigapixel rendering project as part of his Views of the Earth site. He has also posted an Earth rendering tutorial/demonstration that shows some of his techniques. Check it out!

Update:I forgot to note that Povray 3.7 beta 13 is out and expires June 15th

Hey all, I have two articles in the works but they're progressing slowly. The first shows how to make a chess set and the second shows more modeling in JPatch. Like I said, slow going, but there is steady progress. The latest IRTC topic was posted on the FTP site and it's "Light and Fog", so get rendering :). The March-April viewing page is already up.

And finally, from lurking on the newsgroups:

• Thomas de Groot has been working over sandstone textures.
• So has PM 2Ring
• And finally, HDMI is all the rage

Time for something new. I'm going to try to review each IRTC stills round and highlight a few tricks or techniques that catch my attention. The first one's up and covers January-February 2006.

As for everything else, Abe did an amazing job with his sunset clouds - some source included. I've also tossed another playing around image up in the Gallery.

It still seems more quiet than usual - maybe everyone's outside enjoying the warmer weather (for us in the northern hemisphere). I've posted a new image in the gallery and here's some tidbits from the Povray world:

• POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 12 is out and expires May 1. Test renderings are starting to appear.
• POVColor 2.2 was released.
• The current IRTC topic is Music. Have at it!

Mucho Wow to Christoph Hormann for his Views of the Earth website. This really shows what you can do with Povray when you know what you're doing. Stop by and check it out.

Besides that, the day job has been tiring and prevented me from doing more work on ray tracing. I have been digging into some older images of mine and finding new topics (and interesting behaviors) to write about. I'm planning on revisiting media rendering speed versus performance trade-offs, so stay tuned.

After the work on sky spheres, I've created my own sky sphere include file, realskies.inc, that's available for anyone to use. The Sky Sphere Library has been updated to show examples of all the skies in the include file. If you you use, I'd appreciate it if you let me know, but have fun with it either way. There was a good discussion on some additional tricks for skies in the newsgroup

From povray.binaries.images, a few quickies:

• Sean has an amazing snowman scene
• There have been some abstracts that caught my attention.

And finally, some software announcements

• Povray 3.7beta 11c is out and expires April 1 (joke detector engaged)
• Y.A.P.R.M. issued release 0.4.5
• Rheingold3d has kicked out version 1.5 - yes, it's a commercial product
• Blend2Pov (a Blender Povray exporter) increments to version 0.0.3

It's been very quiet on the Povray front for the most part. There havn't been any software updates that I've seen, including a noticably missing Povray 3.7 beta release. Well, that isn't quite true - Blender kicked out v2.40 and then 2.41 which includes fluid and physics simulations. Who's going to be the first to export the results into Povray?

Even in the post-holiday hang-over, several posters have put up some amazing renderings on the newsgroups.

• Kudos to Tek for his planetary sunrise
• A big wow to Bill Pragnell for shooting things through trefoils
• David El Tom figured out the math to do a procedure parquet floor
• And finally, jaw drops to Tim Cook for his clever use of shadow

As for stuff for the site, I've been experimenting offline with doing even better sky_spheres than was described in the realistic sky spheres article. When I think I know enough (is that nebulous enough?), I'm going to revise the sky sphere library to blow some socks off.

Happy New Year to one and all. First up is a new Quick & Dirty on sky spheres. Yes, it's true - I finally finished. Also of note is K3DSurf's 0.5.4 release. All we need now is a new Povray 3.7 beta release to round things out. I have been bad at keeping up with the Povray newsgroups during December, so who knows what else has slipped past me.

Hey all. Some software updates to report:

• Geomorph 0.31 was released
• POVColor 2 release 16 hit the web
• POV-Ray 3.7 beta 11 is available. This one expires Jan 1, 2006