Blender -> PovRay

Hi,

Finaly this is my first Blender-to-POV-Ray image. It took ~ 3.5h to render because I used high quality radiosity and arealights with softshadows.
Comments & hints are welcome.

http://320002096658-0001.bei.t-online.de/image.jpg

Regards,
Andreas

nice work ! i like the details (the books and that little cat etc. :slight_smile: )

Very nice work. Inspiring. I love the bookshelf and its contents, the pics on the floor and the floor itself. My favorite objects are the plant and the pictures.

How did you do it? Are you using POVAnim?

I’ve used POVAnim a few times, just to see if I could get it to work. I made very simple scenes. I also became a used to adjusting the .ini files as well. However I need to make good UV maps before I render something worth posting.

So you UV mapped every texture, and modeled the details versus using bump maps and regular textures, correct?

I know POVAnim recently added the ability to set up a bump map from its script, seperate from whatever you may have created in Blender itself. I had trouble with it, as I tried to produced a quick test.

Here is a thought. What if the chair legs were crome or metal?

Again nice work.

Yes, I’m using POVAnim - it does a good job (thanks to ‘jms’!). All objects are uv mapped, I didn’t use bump maps. Well, it was a lot of work to create all these image-maps.

Regards,
Xtra

Thanks. Very nice work. I think I will give it a go pretty soon.

Truth is, up until now I have been dissappointed in all things POV. I have found them to fall (literally) flat and uninspiring.

Because of you I must now rethink my entire POV belief structure.

Thanks alot. :smiley:

Great job, ancious to see more.

Elsdon

POV rocks and so does pov anim, Im doing a car and I was getting impatient coz it took 15mins to render! You say 3.5hrs and the guy who made a lego car said 40 hrs! I think my comp would overheat and die if I left it going that long. Saying that though the 15 min render still came out really well, using radiosity takes up a lot more time, if only I could use my schools network to render my stuff. Anyway great work patient one.

Yes, POV is great! Elsdon, a view weeks ago my opinion was exactly the same as yours. The reason was, that many POV-Ray galleries only show the famous (but rather boring) sphere on chequered floor - in all variations. A lot of POV-Ray users only use it’s scene description language. In POVs manual you can read that this language is very powerfull. Indeed it is, but in my opinion it’s POV-Rays only disantvantage. Images made with this language often looks ‘strong mathematical’. With a good modeler like Blender (BTW: there’s no need to change the GUI in further versions of Blender, it’s nearly perfect) POV-Ray shows it’s power and potential. POVAnim is the missing link to connect Blender with POV-Ray so you have a powerfull combination.
Blenderage: radiosity, soft shadows, caustics and all that features will increase the render time, but it looks nice then, doesn’t it? :slight_smile:
Oh, there are some guys I know who can do fantastic things with POVs scene description language. Gilles Tran, a French POV-Ray artist is one of them. Visit his web-page on
http://www.oyonale.com and you know what I mean.

Have fun,
Xtra

beautiful. very inspiring inded. i love the way the light seeps in through the window…how did you make image maps work in povray. so far i found it impossible to do.

POVAnim will export UVmaps. Image maps are not yet supported.
Check out the features list here:
http://jmsoler.free.fr/util/blenderfile/povanim.htm

looks very nice.

The light is little bit too bright.

The chair seems to be floating a bit, althought it is not nearly as bad as some that I have seen.

blenderage: you must be patient when working with CG. I have had renders that take 30 min per frame to render, and that was for a 3800 frame animation! Took over 2 months :slight_smile:

Maybe I should have created a new post for this in another section but I know you know what you are talking about. How do you create soft shadows, (i though you just but in a light and povray does the rest) what are caustics and do you need to do radiosity in blender before exporting to Povray if not what buttons do I press in the radiosity window for maximum effect. And two months to render blimey. Does this mean that you can continue unfibished renders?

Hy Xtra, nice image indeed!
What about a tutorial on the PovAnim export process you did, illustrating the setting in the blend file? It could be very useful for all of us which still don’t understand how to make it work properly…

Env

Hi blenderage,

To create softshadows in POV is really simple. It works with area_lights and even with spotlights. The only thing you have to do is to add an area_light directive like this to your lamp definition:

area_light <0, 5, 0>, <0, 0, 5>, 10, 10
adaptive 1
jitter

Please refer the manual to get some infos about the keywords. BTW: a 10 x 10 area_light matrix (like in my example above) is very big, so it’ll take some time to render.
And for spotlights you should use other values for the area_light itself (in this case: <0,1,0>, <0,0,1>).

You asked about caustics? Caustics are a way to produce true reflections and refractions. POV-Ray has two possibilities to enable them: one so called “faked caustics” - very fast but not very realistic, and real caustics - slower. You have to use the photons directive (and some others) to use them. It’s a little bit complicated, so RTFM please :wink:
Yesterday I re-rendered my unicorn picture with POV-Ray and this time I used caustics. You’ll see them on the ground:

http://320002096658-0001.bei.t-online.de/unicorn.jpg

Regarding radiosity: no, you don’t have to enable it in Blender. You have to add a radiosity statement in the global_settings section in your main***.pov file (if you’re using POVAnim). Radiosity has a lot of options, so you should read the manual to understand it.

Render time for this picture was 3.5 hours! Two month? Oh well, my computer would exploding! As far as I know you can say, that POV-Ray shall render the picture particulary (line 1 - 100, 101 - 200 and so on). But you have to put the parts together manually.

Regards,
Xtra

PS: env, I didn’t use all the POVAnim options to export the scene. Instead of this I export the mesh, lamps and so on and for material editing and fine tuning I use the exported ASCII files.

thanks for the help xtra (and nice unicorn)

The greatest problem is to explain how to simulate Blender
materials and lights in povray.
For the moment, in blender, you have to think and set up
parameters with the aim to export to povray.

(I can add buttons to define a standard “finish” for alls
exported materials. There is yet a slider for reflection. One for
ambient, diffuse, spec…?)

hi,

This directive is added by povanim if the light has a “square” option.

 
//lamp number: 1
#declare Lamp2 = light_source{
			0*x
			color rgb&lt;1.0, 1.0, 1.0&gt;*1.0
			spotlight
			point_at &lt;0,0,-1&gt;
			radius  20.8124999
			tightness  0.075
			falloff  22.5
			area_light
			&lt;8, 0, 0&gt; &lt;0, 0, 8&gt;
			4, 4
			adaptive 0
			jitter
			 circular
			orient
			fade_distance 20.0
			fade_power 1
		}

object{ Lamp2
                     rotate &lt;-2.5679869, 2.9e-006, -4.1e-006&gt;
                     translate &lt;2.8247283, 0.3223734, 11.2886896&gt;
		}


Curious settings, the manual gives this example:
<8, 0, 0> <0, 0, 8> // lights spread out across this distance (x * z)

For photon mapping you can aim light and object to povanim exporter and it will add the correct directive.

For light, use the “halo” option.


//lamp number: 1
#declare Lamp2 = light_source{
			0*x
			color rgb&lt;1.0, 1.0, 1.0&gt;*1.0
			area_light
			&lt;2, 0, 0&gt; &lt;0, 0, 2&gt;
			4, 4
			adaptive 0
			jitter
			 circular
			orient
			photons{
 				reflection on
 				refraction on
 				area_light
				}
			fade_distance 20.0
			fade_power 1
		}

For object, use the “Wired” option of the material


object{ Sphere2 
 scale&lt;1.0,1.0,1.0&gt;   rotate&lt;90.0000025045,7.28463062605e-010,-7.28463062605e-010&gt; 
	 translate&lt;0.0,0.0,0.0&gt; 
	 pigment{Material_pig}  
	 finish{Material_fsh}  
	 photons{
		 target 2.0 
		 reflection on
		 refraction on
                	 collect off
		}
		 interior{
 			 ior 2.0 
			 fade_power 1001
 			 fade_distance 0.9
 			 fade_color              &lt;0.5*0.8,0.8*0.8,0.6*0.8&gt;
		}
}

[global_settings] option exports a minimal definition of the photons settings. Just enough to see the effect.

Nice work. Can I make a link to these pictures in the povanim pages?

Povanim is forcasted for that. You can export seperately each part of the scene (light, material etc.) with default descriptions.

jm

Hi jms,

My POV-Ray manual gives an “<1,0,0><0,0,1> 2, 2” example for spotlights (are there different versions available?). The reason may be that spotlights have an infinite small dimension, so the area light should be small too? Of course you can use higher values. I made some tests with spotlights and <5,0,0><0,0,5> and higher, but sometimes the shadows where spreaded out to much then - at least for a spot light.

Oh, and feel free to set links to my pictures … :slight_smile:

Regards,
Xtra

In fact, not exactly the manual but the inserted model of area_light in the Povray35’s Windows Editor.

Thank you.

Regards