🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, Persistence of Vision or POV for short is not an animation
program per se, its a ray tracer, and in my oppinion its one of the
best FREE PD ray tracers,

I have it running on a 25 MHz 386, and a Sun 4 sparc station
here are some times that I came up with.

             160 X 120 res test rendering no antialias
             somewhat complicated file (same file was used for
             both machines)
             Sun took 45 seconds
             PC  took 4.5 mins

Admittedly this is a small picture but I just wanted to see what
the time differece was, the file btw was cluster.pov.
the language it uses to construct is easy to understand and
it also is very flexible as far as defining your own objects
and keeping them in a library to include into a image.

as an example, Im currently working on  a rendering of a greek
temple, and to do this Im developing a library of objects
such as Columns, odd shaped blocks of marble, etc etc.
and I have only worked with POV for a few weeks now.

I has a multitude of built in features, such as image mapping
bump maps, hight fields, etc etc...

Now, if you want to do animation, you can certainly use POV to
generate the frames, I think there are some PD programs out there
that do camera paths, and other assorted things,
the file output that POV provides is pretty much portable to
any machine, Macs PCs UNIX boxes whatever,

Take a look at it, its quite good.
I cant wait for an upgrade.

-ara