h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The best raytracing program I've heard of, and the one they used to make Babylon 5 was Light Wave, but the only package I have used is Imagine on the Amiga, you could render a 3d cow in that, cool

I've use POV (Persistance of Vision). It's a good program, but awkward to program.

POVray all the way There are some modelers which can output the
needed files for POVray.
It is supposed to be the best of the free raytracers, check out
http://www.povray.org/ with links to animation utilities and modeling
programs, as well as the program and galleries of images.

POVRay is one of the best shareware raytracers around. At least it used to be shareware and it's a long time since I looked, but I still think you can get it. Have a look at www.povray.org for its use.

Others of interest are

BlueMoon raytracer - uses Pixars RenderMan shaders. I believe these are available under POVRay now too.

Mental Ray - easily one of the best around. Unfortunately it generally comes attached to a certain high end package called SoftImage, or just 'soft' amoungst the 3d artists fraternity. There's a great news group for discussion on it's use. The unfortunate thing is you'll have to pay good money for the set up. Available through Avid for Microsoft NT or SGIs, the latest incantation named Sumatra is the business. You'll need some processing power underneath though.

Alias/WaveFronts MAYA is about the fullest featured renderer you can pay money for. It offers hybrid ray-tracing and radiosity rendering to give you the best possible results. Basically everything and the kitchen sink. Weighs in at a good £12,000 for the full package though so you might need to be attached to a graphics studio/ 3d graphics course to have a chance of playing with it.

Pixar's RenderMan tools - well, used to be the best set of in-house tools around. In recent years they've added some great U.I. so that mear mortals can use them. Pixar brought you ToyStory,Bugs Life and soon Toy Story 2 (April 2000 aledgedly). Chief exec is still Steve Jobs who part owns the company. Head honcho is a guy called Ed Catmull, that's Doctor Ed to you. If you're in to graphics research needless to say you'll know who this pleasant fellow is. Also of note is a chap called John A. Lasseter, director of animation for Red's Dream, Tin Toy et al.

Finally, ahem, contrary to popular belief, ray tracers are used in f.m.v. based games. I can vouch for a game called 'Starship Titanic' being a member of the dev team, and also Myst. Both these titles used ray tracing extensively in their production.

Tally ho....

wow i didn't realise there were so many raytracing programs out there, its been a long time since i used one, my old amiga couldn't really cope with the raytracing, too little cpu power and ram really, but now we've got a amd 450, athalon 600 and a 266 we should be able to do some quite good stuff. Are there any shareware raytracers that let use a network to do the rendering, so that you could use the cpu power of all of the machines?

Hey, "Starship Titanic" was a pretty cool game. I recall the "set designer" had won a Hollywood award - it showed. Great scenes, although I think the point about Ray Tracing not being too valuable in games is still valid, since the S. T. scenes were mostly static, like Myst. Still ...

I've been using Metacreations products with some success, I think they are ray-traced based. Bryce for landscapes, Ray Dream Studio for general modelling (about to become Carrara). Sort of a balance between shareware and $10,000 packages, they can usually be found for $100 to $200.

- Steve K.

POV-Ray is of course the best raytracer - better than many you can buy these days, unless you go the expensive LightWave route. LightWave is of course probably the best raytracer/modeller in the commercial scene, followed by Cinema 4D which has stunningly fast render times due to its selective employ of raytracing and scanline rendering.

POV-Ray is free now, and you can get it for virtually any system you care to name. www.povray.org

and my website which has a slowly growing POV-Ray 3.1 tutorial - www.walton42.freeuk.com

(shameless self-promotion)

Wow, awesome. I just finished a sort of surrealist image with POV-Ray and posted it on my h2g2 page (also a shameless self-promotion).

Gotta love the POV.

Distributed rendering is possible, speeding up the whole process by
farming out small chunks of the scene to be calculated, the colating
the whole thing back together again. It's really the only way you can
get through big raytraced/rendered images, of the types used in the
movies - A big bunch of Alpha machines were used as a rendering farm
for Titanic, for example.
If you're running a unix like operating system on your machines - I
don't know about if there are windows ports of the needed bits of
software - then you could look at using PVM-POV to do parallel
rendering to see what happens. This is a re-written version of POVray
that uses the PVM message libraries to build a distributed raytracer.
A version of this has rendered a standard benchmark image in 2
seconds. This machine was built from 96 PIII's running at 500MHz each.
The fastest single processor machine is 5 seconds, for a playstation 2
development board.
Check out http://www.haveland.com/povbench for more results.

As an aside a british company, Advanced Rendering Technology, produces
specialist dedicated hardware to do the raytracing tasks.
http://www.art.co.uk for more info

I can recommend Bryce (2, 3D, 4) 2 is available as a free working app it was distributed on the cover CDs about a year ago in a lot ok UK mags. It runs on Macs and PCs and it a excellent intro to the world of 3D rendering created by a chap called Kai (of PowerGoo fame) It has a most unconventional interface that differs in the exteme from anything else I have seen but it keeps a lot of 'underneath the bonnet / hood' that can cause a lot og grief and confusion. V4 is very flexible in the model file types it can importie DXF 3DS etc which there are a whole world of on the net.

Seethe sites below, for what Bryce can do and how it is supported:

http://www.chemicalstudios.com/

http://www.hilltopdesign.com/common/index.html

I use it on Macs 200Mhz (Satisfactory) Put kettle on a roll a fag and smoke it render times on average - G3 300Mhz roll and smoke a fag - G4 roll a fag, done

Yup. I'm using Bryce 3D on a Pentium II 450 MhZ with 128 MB RAM - the renders are pretty fast, but even faster when you turn off the antialiasing (choice: none, normal, "fine art"), and faster yet when you hit one of the little blobs near the render blob - it turns on "fast render" which is only two pass instead of five or whatever. For test renders, its almost immediate. Then when you get what you want, you turn everything back on, roll a fag, put the kettle on, etc. Big animations can still take all night.

I think that's part of the joy of ray-tracing - you have to be prepared to wait.

Metacreations (Bryce, Poser, Ray Dream) is issuing press releases about dumping all these programs. So I'm looking at options. Lightwave sounds interesting at list price $2000, street around $1700, and I've seen it on an auction for $1000. Newtek is the company, they also make Inspire 3D - anybody know anything about these? I think Inspire list is about $500, street about $350. The specs make it sound like Inspire does animation with the Lightwave engine. So what does it NOT have from Lightwave?

I've spent the last three nights (I sleep in the day) learning POVRay and I like it. The thing is, I've drawn loads of stuff in TrueSpace and I haven't figured out any way of sending files from TrueSpace to POVRay. Any suggestions? I suspect that the methods of creation are so different that there is no way to do this. (TrueSpace seems to use meshes without a history of creation)

Also, anyone know how to get a job in the 3D art industry?

Hey Peregrin, long time no see. If you're just talking about importing models from Truespace into POV, there's a handy little converter at http://www.europa.com/~keithr/Crossroads/index.html

Thanks ddombrow! Excellent, just what I wanted.
I haven't been on h2g2 much recently because I've become obsessed with 3D modelling... I'll have to find some way of integrating the two

Tell me about about it. I got Metacreations Bryce, Poser, and Ray Dream Studio in a Suite, I didn't go to sleep for a week.

*Peregrin drools*
Somebody offered me pirated copies of 3D Studio MAX, Bryce 4, Poser 4, AutoCAD 14, trueSpace 4 and various other things, but I'm taking the honest route and sticking to POVRay and trueSpace 3. I prefer POVRay anyway. Honest.

These morals are annoying. I think I'll have them removed.

It's OK, I mean look at the performace/price ratio of these things, POVray easily beats them all into submission.

Of course POV is good. I mean look at the stuff on the Internet Raytracing Competition - most of that's done with POV-Ray I believe.

http://www.irtc.org