Wykan wrote in message <01bd35a1$c21e14c0$29fbca98@default>...
>Greetings, all.
>
>I am relatively new to ray tracing and to POV, and I am trying to sort out
>the complex flood of information. Perhaps someone can answer a few
>questions for me:
>
># 1 - Do I need anything besides POV to do ray tracings? It seems that I do
>not, but I have heard much talk of the various utilities available, such as
>Moray, Texture Magic, and others. Are these utilities necessary, or merely
>helpful?

You don't NEED anything, but I find that sPatch is a great program and will
allow you to make things that are just too complicated to do "by hand" in
the POV editor.  I have downloaded other modelers (Scene Builder, Breeze
Designer, etc.), but I find that the more I learn about POV the less I use
them.  Terrain Maker is also a good program for making height fields (but it
is a DOS program).

># 2 - Which among the various utilities available are Shareware? Or better
>yet, Freeware?

The above-mentioned are free.

># 4 - I am particularly interested in creating animation; what utilities
>(if any) will I need?

tga2avi is a good program for making animations out of Targa files (can't
find the link to it... keep checking the newsgroups and somebody will post
it sooner or later).

There are lots of other POV utilities out there.. most are free.  Use your
favorite search engine to find 'em, download 'em, and use the ones that you
like.  Seems like everybody has a different opinion on what's good and
what's not (except for sPatch, which everybody likes), so experiment.

sPatch:
http://www.aimnet.com/~clifton/spatch.html

Breeze Designer:
http://www.imagos.fl.net.au/

Scene Builder:
http://povsb.simplenet.com/povsb.html

Terrain Maker:
http://www.itsnet.com/~varmint/html/tm.htm

POV utility warehouse:
http://quark.vpplus.com/~redbeard/raytrace/POVRay-Util.html

Hope this helps.

Eric

--
"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped."
- Groucho Marx

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/2354/
http://www.datasync.com/~reba/

>
>Any assistance, advice, or information will be greatly appreciated. Please
>feel free to send E-mail to me at Wyk### [at] usanet.
>
>Wykan

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