POV-Ray

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Revision as of 22:57, 13 April 2021 by NDF (talk | contribs) (Windows install and macOS information)
The development of POV-Ray seems to be halted. The latest stable version is 3.7.0.8 (2018-05-27), the latest development version is 3.8.0-x (2019-02-19), the official project on GitHub has been edited the last time on 2019-03-08. Please remove this warning if the situation changes
This page is actually a work in progress, feel free to contribute

Description

POV-Ray (The Persistence of Vision Raytracer) is one of the two renderers supported by the Raytracing workbench together with LuxRender. It is also supported by the new Render Workbench, together with LuxCoreRender, Appleseed, Blender Cycles and Intel Ospray Studio (experimental).

Installation

Raytracing Workbench

The Raytracing workbench is being superseded by the new Render Workbench, which is intended as its replacement. This must not be confused with the halted and outdated Render project. The Render Workbench can be installed through the Addon Manager. The information here is provided because by default FreeCAD is still shipped (as of 0.19-24276) with the Raytracing Workbench

Stable Version

The latest stable version of POV-Ray to be provided with binaries is 3.7.0.0 (2013-11-06), the first to be free software, released under the AGPL3 (or later). The latest stable version of POV-Ray, released only as source code is 3.7.0.8 (2018-05-27).

Linux

Compiled binaries

If your distribution has it in the official repositories, you can install POV-Ray and all the relative dependencies through the package manager. Such distributions include: Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, openSUSE, Ubuntu.

Compiling from source

If your distributions does not have POV-Ray in the repositories, or you wish to, it is possible to compile POV-Ray from source. Download the source code of POV-Ray 3.7.0.8 from GitHub

Configuring FreeCAD

After installing POV-Ray, launch FreeCAD, open the Preferences Editor, load the Raytracing Workbench, and go to the Raytracing Preferences.

Set the POV-Ray executable path to point to your installation of POV-Ray, usually it is /usr/bin/povray, and apply.

macOS

There is no official binary of POV-Ray 3.7 or newer for macOS, if you want to compile it from source, probably you are on your own.

The most recent available binaries are of the old closed source POV-Ray 3.6x.

Windows

The latest stable version of POV-Ray to have compiled Windows binaries is POV-Ray 3.7.0.0. Download it from GitHub, launch the installer and follow the proposed steps.

By default the destination folder is C:\Program Files\POV-Ray\v3.7, with documents and scenes in C:\Users\{your user}\Documents\POV-Ray\v3.7.

After installing POV-Ray, launch FreeCAD, open the Preferences Editor, load the Raytracing Workbench, and go to the Raytracing Preferences.

Set the POV-Ray executable path to point to your installation of POV-Ray, usually it is C:/Program Files/POV-Ray/v3.7/bin/pvengine64.exe, and apply.

Then, before trying to render something, start POV-Ray separately and set I/O restrictions according to POV-Ray documentation, otherwise rendering will not work properly (or will not work at all).

Development Version

Linux

macOS

Windows

Render Workbench

Stable Version

Linux

macOS

Windows

Development Version

Linux

macOS

Windows