T U T O R I A L

INTRODUCTION
Probably most of you, who read this tutorial, are quite familiar with the technique called »RAY-TRACING«. For those of you, who hadn’t have too much contact with this topic so far, the following paragraphs try to give you a glimpse of what the whole thing's all about. Everyone else, who happens to know, what modellers and tracers are for, can move right along to the table of contents.
· Firstly there's the main question »What is the purpose of POVLAB?«. Well there's a brief answer: POVLAB is a graphic-modeller, which lets you create nothing less than new worlds!

· With its »easy-2-use«-graphical interface and with an intuitive mouse support, POVLAB provides features, needed to create and manipulate ...
  • simple objects like planes, spheres, cones, discs, cubes, cylinders etc.
  • more complex objects like toruses, curves, blobs, spheres, extruded objects, heightfields etc.
  • various light sources such as spotlights, area lights, point lights, cylindrical lights and multiple cameras for up to 10 different views
    •
· All objects, that you insert into a scene, are displayed as »wireframe models«. This means, that they are represented by a more or less complex net of lines (wires), letting you actually look through.

· Specific surface-parameters, like reflectivness or roughness, will not be displayed but are evaluated and calculated later on by the raytracing-program (in our case, this raytracer is called »POVRAY«; you will hear more about POVRAY later in this tutorial). 		· Beyond the creating stage, POVLAB provides full functionality for designing fictional scenes. Within such scenes you can ...
  • put the above mentioned objects into order
  • establish various cameras for different viewing angles
  • give the scene the ultimate kick by applying nifty textures and colors to objects
  • use multiple light sources to make the scenes illumination meet your needs
· So far, all sounds quite simple - scene design, many predefined objects, various methods of grouping objects, a huge library of textures - you just name it, POVLAB’s got it.

· But there is one thing, YOU should bring in, and that is imagination and patience. Rumor has it, that one of the »all-time-greatest-artists« modelled, designed and rendered this planet in just seven days (most likely not on a Windows-PC !!!).

· Most of your scenes will take significantly more time until they're finished. But always remember - the more detailed the objects are, the better and more realistic the final scene will look - and that makes modelling and raytracing so fascinating.
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This page was last modified on: 1996-07-27 		Mail to the author of the POVLAB-Tutorial:
lepschi@source.co.at