The persistence of vision ray-tracer

POV-Ray is a good, free software only available for Windows, that belongs to the category Design & photography software with subcategory 3D Design (more specifically 3D Design & Modelling).

More about POV-Ray

It’s available for users with the operating system Windows 95 and former versions, and it is available in English. Its current version is 3.6.1 and it has been updated on 2/17/2006.Since we added this program to our catalog in 2006, it has obtained 14,516 downloads, and last week it gained 7 downloads. POV-Ray is a slick software that needs less storage space than most software in the section Design & photography software. It’s very heavily used in many countries such as Brazil, United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray-tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file.

Ray-tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects.