1.1.3 Who Can Use POV-Ray for Unix?

Almost anyone can use POV-Ray for Unix. If you have never seen a ray tracing program before, you can have great fun just rendering the sample scenes and animations installed together with POV-Ray for Unix. Once you have studied some scene files and spent a little bit of time reading this documentation, you can start putting basic scene files together.

Remember, though, that you do need to invest some time getting to know the program. For instance, you do not have to worry about most of the POV-Ray settings at first, but some of them are critical. Ignore them and POV-Ray for Unix may not do what you expect. The default settings have been selected so as to be satisfactory in the large majority of cases, but sometimes they will not give you what you want. Don't give up. The solution is bound to be a simple one, as long as you take the time to read the documentation. Investing a little bit of time getting to know the program will pay off - guaranteed!

As for experienced POV-Ray users, you will find that running POV-Ray in a Unix environment makes life much easier. Working under Unix means you can use editors and other powerful tools with which you may already be quite familiar. POV-Ray modes exist for popular text editors such as Emacs, and these provide many of the features found in the POV-Ray GUI interface on other platforms.