2.1.4 Features

Here are some highlights of POV-Ray's features:

Easy to use scene description language.
Large library of stunning example scene files.
Standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors and textures.
Very high quality output image files (up to 48-bit color).
16 and 24 bit color display on many computer platforms using appropriate hardware.
Create landscapes using smoothed height fields.
Many camera types, including perspective, orthographic, fisheye, etc.
Spotlights, cylindrical lights and area lights for sophisticated lighting.
Photons for realistic, reflected and refracted, caustics. Photons also interact with media.
Phong and specular highlighting for more realistic-looking surfaces.
Inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity) for more realistic lighting.
Atmospheric effects like atmosphere, ground-fog and rainbow.
Particle media to model effects like clouds, dust, fire and steam.
Several image file output formats including Targa, BMP (Windows only), PNG and PPM.
Basic shape primitives such as ... spheres, boxes, quadrics, cylinders, cones, triangle and planes.
Advanced shape primitives such as ... Tori (donuts), bezier patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics, smooth triangles, text, superquadrics, surfaces of revolution, prisms, polygons, lathes, fractals, isosurfaces and the parametric object.
Shapes can easily be combined to create new complex shapes using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray supports unions, merges, intersections and differences.
Objects are assigned materials called textures (a texture describes the coloring and surface properties of a shape) and interior properties such as index of refraction and particle media (formerly known as "halos").
Built-in color and normal patterns: Agate, Bozo, Bumps, Checker, Crackle, Dents, Granite, Gradient, Hexagon, Leopard, Mandel, Marble, Onion, Quilted, Ripples, Spotted, Spiral, Radial, Waves, Wood, Wrinkles and image file mapping. Or build your own pattern using functions.
Users can create their own textures or use pre-defined textures such as ... Brass, Chrome, Copper, Gold, Silver, Stone, Wood.
Combine textures using layering of semi-transparent textures or tiles of textures or material map files.
Display preview of image while rendering (not available on all platforms).
Halt and save a render part way through, and continue rendering the halted partial render later.