One of the most popular and long-lived ray tracing programs is the freeware program Persistence of Vision, or POV-RAY for short. I remember using this program before I was even using Windows (“Back in my day, we didn’t even have Windows! We had to type in our commands!”), and the program has survived and even thrived with the explosion of the Internet (“Back in my day, there was no such thing as the Internet!”). You can find the Web site for the program at [http://www.povray.org].You can use POV-RAY to create truly amazing and lifelike computer graphics—if you have the patience to learn the scene description language, which is a fully blown programming language in its own right. Tons of sample rendering scripts come with the program, which can help you learn the language. If you’re more visual in nature or find the programming language too unwieldy, you can use a shareware Computer-Aided Drawing (CAD) program such as Moray, which allows you to visually construct the three-dimensional scenes like you might do in AutoCAD and then export the scene in the POV-RAY scene description language for rendering.Much of the rendering done in the POV-RAY community focuses on creating complex, realistic scenes. Indeed, the POV-RAY Web site highlights a random image from its Hall of Fame, and most of these images are amazing shots that look like they’re straight from Industrial Light and Magic. Several years ago, I came up with the idea that the ray tracer would be equally useful in creating single, individual elements for simple games. The dice and tiles used in the NineTiles game are some examples of the game elements created using the POV-RAY program (and the Moray CAD program).Trying to discuss the POV-RAY scene description language in an appendix wouldn’t nearly do the program justice. This appendix shows a small sample of the Dice object used in the first chapters of this book to whet your appetite and introduce you to something new and cool you can do on your computer.
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