POV-Ray is a photo-realistic rendering engine. OK, I know. What is a "photo-realistic rendering engine"? It is a program that reads a set of instructions, called a "scene description file", and based on that information creates a graphics file.

The image at the top of this page is an example. I can say it is not a very good example because it is a graphic I created but at least I won't have to worry about any copy-write issues. If I would have had to use a program, Microsoft's Paint for example, I guarantee you that the clouds and water in the top image of this page wouldn't have had the appearance it does.

What will you find here?

Let's get right to the good stuff and I'll do that by supplying the link to POV-Ray's Site. Be sure to check out the POV-Ray Hall of Fame to see why I am so enthralled by the creative possibilities of this software. And by the way, it's available for MS Windows too!

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. It does animations too! Check out my tutorial on creating animations with POV-Ray.

You've seen these types of images many times, the waves in the movie "Titanic" were created using a rendering engine and incidentally, Linux powered computers.