Scientific Visualizations with POV-Ray

In order to compile with your changes, you may need to make some minor modifications to src/Makefile, which is generated once you run configure from the top-level POV-Ray directory. This is the case if you are using external libraries for your history file reading routines or if you've written a separate piece of code to handle file I/O.

Once compiled, you can invoke POV-Ray from the command line. The following command would read from cloud.pov and create a 600×400 anti-aliased PPM file, displaying to the screen as it rendered:

/home/orf/povray-3.50c-orf/src/povray +D \
Input_File_Name=cloud Width=600 Height=400 \
Antialias=on Output_File_Type=P

Once your data has rendered successfully with POV-Ray, you have POV-Ray's extensive set of configurable options to choose from to render your scene exactly the way you want. If you have data that changes over time, making animations is straightforward and rewarding. I have written Python scripts to invoke an instance of POV-Ray on each of the processors on my small renderfarm, where each processor works concurrently on a different model time. The resulting PPM files then are joined together to make animations, using mjpegtools. See my research page for some animations. I also have created stereo images and animations for display on our department's GeoWall system. Stereo pair generation is trivial with POV-Ray and truly can give you a whole new perspective on your data. Getting POV-Ray to work with my model data has opened the door to many exciting possibilities for me, and I hope that it will for you, too.

Resources for this article: /article/7754.