POV-Ray
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer because of contributions from its author, Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software, with the source code available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license.
Key facts
- Software.name
- POV-Ray
- Software.logo
- Povray logo sphere.png
- Software.logo size
- 140px
- Software.author
- David Kirk Buck, Aaron A. Collins, Alexander Enzmann
- Software.developer
- The POV-Team
- Software.programming language
- C++
- Software.operating_system
- Cross-platform
- Software.genre
- Ray tracer
- Software.license
- AGPL-3.0-or-later
via Wikipedia infobox
Source code
While we do not generally sign beta releases, it is our policy that official releases for the Windows platform are expected to be signed. As of version v3.7, the source for POV-Ray is licensed under the AGPL3. The documentation is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, and support files such as SDL includes, macros, sample scenes and so forth are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (see each file header for the specific one). Discussion regarding POV-Ray is traditionally done via our forums at These are also available via NNTP at news://news.povray.org/ for those preferring that. Please note that the POV-Ray developers do not monitor all forums regularly. The ones we tend to check most frequently are povray.general, povray.windows and povray.unix. At this point in time, the only platform for which the project distributes pre-built 'official' (i.e. supported) binaries is Microsoft Windows. These may be obtained via At this point in time we generally recommend building from the latest version of the latest-stable branch. Alternatively, you may want to opt for a recent tagged version to test-drive features that have been added since the latest stable release. Please do not build directly from the master branch (or any other non-stable branch for that matter), as versions from that branch may report ambiguous version numbers, making it difficult to obtain version-specific support or report bugs in a useful manner. POV-Ray should compile on any POSIX-compliant system with the required tools (please see unix/README.md for build instructions), on Microsoft Windows systems that have Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 or later installed (targeting XP or later, both 32 and 64-bit - be sure to see windows/README.md, otherwise your build will not work ), and also on Mac systems (console mode only, using an appropriately-modified version of the unix build - not currently provided by us). When built and installed via the means provided in the source tree, all versions of POV-Ray come with documentation. For the Unix build, this is in the form of a manpage giving basic usage, and full HTML-based documentation. For the Windows version, there is a HtmlHelp (.CHM) file provided. We prefer that you contact us via the forums mentioned at the head of this document. If the matter is one that requires direct email contact (and this generally will NOT include tech support requests, though exceptions are made for package maintainers) you may use the address listed at the bottom of
~12 min read
Article
13 sectionsContents
- History
- Features
- Current version
- Primitives
- Examples of the scene description language
- Modeling
- Software
- Development and maintenance
- Platform support
- Licensing
- See also
- References
- External links
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer because of contributions from its author, Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software, with the source code available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license.
==History== thumb|A vase on a pedestal rendered with DKBTrace 2.12 Sometime in the 1980s, David Kirk Buck downloaded the source code for a Unix ray tracer to his Amiga. He experimented with it for a while and eventually decided to write his own ray tracer named DKBTrace after his initials. He posted it to the "You Can Call Me Ray" bulletin board system (BBS) in Chicago, thinking others might be interested in it. In 1987, Aaron A. Collins downloaded DKBTrace and began working on an x86 port of it. He and David Buck collaborated to add several more features. POV also had/has similarities with (and borrows from) Rayshade, another BBS era raytracer, including the Rayshade book.