Movies made with POVRAY

The earlier pages considered optical scenes.  Over the years of using POVRAY I've also applied it to other situations.  On this page I've collected a selection of the most appealing to a casual observer.  I've used not only POVRAY, but also Vista-Pro and Terragen.  These two latter programs were invaluable for creating scenes which would act as input stimulii for sensors.

Many of these movies are rather elderly.  Originally created as uncompressed *.avi,  they're now in compressed format so I'm unable to show a 'splash' screen as a taster.

This movie is one that I made to show the business of my employer, presently known as Thales Optronics.  I created 6 POVRAY and/or VistaPro sequences of 256 frames of technological  tasks and pasted them on the origami cube.  I then pasted the cube on a 256 frame background of a VistaPro river run.


Tanks and helicopters and winged aircraft are an essential part of the scenarios for radar and thermal infrared sensors.  I believe I obtained the mesh files for the Apache helicopter and the Abrams M1 tank from other POVRAY contributors or the 3-D cafe website.  I did a very large amount of deconstructing the original files so that I could operate the moving parts separately.  In the thermal infrared there are no point 'light_sources', so one textures the skin with 'ambient' according to temperature.  This is a weakness of POVRAY- to use photon mapping properly, one needs to cover the entire surface with point light sources.  I've done this for  simple geometry - but there should be a  capability to do this properly with genuine 'glowing' surfaces emitting real photons.


Thanks to Ken Colefax for the matrix transforms to do the terrain following by colocating the tracks and the heightmap terrain.  The gun barrel moves to stay pointed at a fixed target as the hull heaves, rolls and pitches. The trees are 'grown' using a recursive algorithm.
 
This is a cross-eye stereo movie of the classical solids.  On the advice of an opthamologist I found that enhancing one's ability to perceive 3-D images using eye-crossing cured headaches...a colleague has found the same relief....I was amazed!  And it's rather less boring than staring at stationary images.
Fix the headache #1
1MB
Thanks to Ken Colefax for his 'explode'  codes for this one:

   
More diamonds - but without chromatic effects.


A Ken Colefax's 'cities'  waterfront night scene in a scattering media atmosphere.  Downlights illuminate the road and waterfront and harbour.  A car passes the shopfronts. A helicopter searchlight tracks a speeding car.
 


This is a flyby of Jupiter and his Galilean satellites Io, Europa, Callisto and Gannymede, created in POVRAY, using the surface image maps published by NASA.

JupiTour
6MB


The MEGAPOV patches can use collision mechanics codes. Visit

   http://tofbouf.free.fr/clothray/index_en.htm

to see how to make this kind of thing

 itsarap.m1v
0.6MB
and
http://megapov.inetart.net/
to see how to make this kind of thing
balzofun.m1v
1.5MB


And this must be my favourite.  I just wish I could recall how I made it!

                                                                    A chance fractal
10MB




©Don Barron 2005