Final Report

Using POV-Ray to Create Realistic Images

Brian Engel
Computer Graphics II, 4003-571-70
Reynold Bailey

http://bengelcg.blogspot.com

The main goal of the project is to gain understanding of POV-Ray and use it to generate several different scenes using many of the techniques used in class. I’ll begin by creating a few simple scenes to gain understanding and then generate a more complex scene.

Introduction and Problem/Project Description:

• The project was based around using POV-Ray and Art of Illusion to both show the capabilities of POV-Ray, emphasis the texture usage and recreate a realistic looking scene. My objectives for this project were to gain an understanding of both POV-Ray and Art of Illusion and then produce compelling images using them. This includes a few simplistic looking scenes to show off custom objects and textures as well as a realistic looking image. This involved lots of research in order to understand the full functionality of POV-Ray and all of its features. The same applies to Art of Illusion. This project covers rich textures and realism in the render pipeline.
  

Approach:

• The project uses POV-Ray to create and display complex and realistic looking 3D images. This focuses on the Texture and Realistic portion of the rendering pipeline.

Technical Details:

• The actual creation of objects requires several set operations in order to create specific shapes. Within POV-Ray, one of the scenes shows off the looping capability of POV-Ray’s SDL (Scene Description Language).
  

Project Components:

• Generating code to create photorealistic scenes
• Using Art of Illusion to create more complex objects to be used

Results:




Future Enhancements:

• If this was an ongoing project, I would look into building several complex objects to help fill out the scene more. Creating these objects takes a large amount of time and tweaking to get them to look right. I’d also explore more complicated textures beyond the basic glass, wood and chrome look.
  

Appendix A:

• POV-Ray is free and available for download at http://www.povray.org. Art of Illusion can be found at http://www.artofillusion.org/ and is free to download. Both programs are free and available for Mac, Widows and Linux. These programs can be ran and then used to open .pov and .aoi files. In POV-Ray, open the file and click on the “Render” menu and then “Start Rendering”. This should display the resulting image.