This magazine was constructed with a little help from POV-Ray 2.0, an application which came on MACFORMAT's APRIL CD-ROM.

POV-Ray allows you to define a scene with 'C-like' source code, specifying the location of objects, cameras and lights, textures and colours of objects and attributes of materials. Scenes can be animated easily and saved as quicktime movies with the aid of 3rd party applications.

POV-Ray was used extensively during the construction of this WWW Magazine for the creation of various icons and headers.

Go forth and ray trace !!!


Example scene and image

This small example shows how easy it is to create a scene using only a few lines of code.

// Persistence Of Vision raytracer version 2.0.

#include "colors.inc"
#include "textures.inc"

camera {
   location  <0, 1, -30>
   direction <0, 0,  1>
   right   <4/3, 0,  0>
   look_at   <0, 0, 0>
}

light_source {<10, 20, -30> color White}

// Sky sphere 
sphere { <0, 0, 0>, 10000
   pigment {color blue 0.8}
}

// Floor plane 
plane { y, -10
   pigment {
      checker colour Yellow colour Green
      scale 20
   }
   finish {ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.9}
}

// Sphere object 
sphere
{
 <0, 0, 0> // center of sphere x,y,z
 10        // radius of sphere
 texture {Chrome_Texture} 
 pigment {color red 0.8 green 0.9 blue 1.0}
 finish {
        phong 1
        phong_size 80
	specular 0.5 roughness 0.001
        refraction 1.0
        }
}