The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray tracing program available for a variety of computer platforms. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer contributed by its author Alexander Enzmann. It is available free of charge.

The intentions of this book is to make it a High School textbook for use in a graphics art class. At the end of each section there will be some of the following resources that can be used in the classroom: lesson plans, assignments, solutions to assignments, quizzes, tests, and links to other resources that might be useful.

Before the Beginning

This book will assume that you have knowledge of the Windows, Linux, or Mac OSX operating systems and how menus, mouse movement and generic commands like copy and paste work. If there is a command that is specific to POV-Ray more details might be provided. A Requisite basic introduction to computing can be found at Computers for Beginners.

Table of Contents

A printable version of POV-Ray is available. (edit it)

• Set up
• Getting started - creating your first drawing Category:Book:POV-Ray#%20 Category:Subject:3D graphics software#POV-Ray