DKBTrace (foundation of POV-Ray) creator has kickstarter for educational IDE
David K. Buck - the creator of DKBTrace, the pioneering raytracer that was the genesis of POV-Ray - has created a KickStarter campaign to fund creation of an open-source IDE for PigeonTalk (PigeonTalk is a smalltalk implementation created by David that is aimed at being a programming environment to explore computing). "I chose Smalltalk as a language because it provides the most immersive experience I've encountered. Smalltalk allows you to create, use, and explore software in a very hands-on way. It's an ideal environment for learning and playing with software. This Kickstarter project is to provide a development environment for this Smalltalk which I'm calling PigeonTalk. The development environment would run in a web browser and would communicate with the Smalltalk engine using WebSockets. Once this is available, PigeonTalk becomes a viable programming environment that others could use." We wish David the best in this endeavor and are hopeful the Kickstarter will meet its goal as POV-Ray itself would not exist if it were not for David's kind contribution of the DKBTrace source code.
POV-Ray v3.8.0 beta tests available
POV-Ray 3.8 is now in beta-test. You may obtain beta releases via our GitHub repository. Discussion regarding the betas should be directed to the beta-test group in our forums.
POV-Ray turns 30
Wiki back online
The POV-Wiki is now back online and is running the latest version of MediaWiki. Additionally we have restored our legacy bugtracker, which tracked issues prior to moving our source code to GitHub.
Forums back online
Following more recovery work since the server crash we're happy to say our ... ... [read more]
Server Recovery
The www.povray.org site is now back in read-write mode ... ... [read more]
POV-Ray Server Downtime
Our server recently experienced a catastrophic hardware failure ... ... [read more]
Blender to Persistence of Vision
New Release: Blender to Persistence of Vision ... [read more]
white_dune VRML/X3D editor adds POV-Ray export
The folks at the open-source white_dune 3d editor project let us know that they've added POV-Ray export capability. Neat! It looks like a useful tool, definitely worth checking out. You can find their github repo here or if you prefer you can go straight to their project website for downloads.
Call for papers: Ray Tracing Gems
Eric Haines dropped us a line to let us know that there is still time to submit papers to Ray Tracing Gems ... ... [read more]