Adventures in PovRay - Part 1 - Walkthrough

This isn't meant to be a tutorial on getting started with PovRay, there are a million and one of those on the web (google is your friend remember), this is just meant to be an illustration of how quickly you get something looking half decent with very little effort.

Ok, so without even reading the instructions it's clear that in a ray-tracing program you're going to need a camera, a light source, and at least one object to look at. You may have guessed from other pictures on my site that I love those damned robots, so here was stage 1 - it's a sphere, with 3 other sphere's cut out (using CSG - Constructive Solid Geometry):

Ok, simple enough, so let's add a torso and some arms, and give the robot a bit of a metallic finish:

Let's make the scene a bit more interesting, with an infinite plane and some sky:

Ok, so now I'm thinking how cool it would be if PovRay supports the ability to bundle up my existing Robot Man model into a reusable object, so I can create lots of them with no effort - what do you know, it can!

PovRay is just too cool for school. All that was left was to add another light source for good measure, and crank up the various fancy options (like radiosity, camera focus, anti-aliasing, etc) for that lovely "straight from the salon" finish:

It may not be much, but remember it only took an hour to get from downloading the software to producing this final image. And what's more, this image is generated from only a few lines of code! I fully intend playing around with PovRay some more (when I next get a spare hour of course), I'll try and post some updates if I turn out anything truly spectacular :o)

(back up)