Raytracing and POV-Ray - an introduction

From the feedback i got concerning this website i have the impression that for people not so familiar with the techniques of computer graphics it is sometimes difficult to imagine how the images shown here are made. With this introduction it should be possible at least to get a rough idea how this works no matter what previous knowledge you have.

This introduction is split into several pages, if you have only very little experience with computers and computer graphics you should best start with the first part, if you are already familiar with the basics you can skip the first chapter.

• an introduction for newbies, introducing the basic concepts of images in the computer and how they can be generated.
• the details, explaining the different rendering techniques available with focus on raytracing.
• introduction to POV-Ray, what POV-Ray is and how i create images.
• the POV-Ray scene description language, a short example in POV-SDL showing the basic concepts and the advantages of script based scene design.

In every part you can find a list of links to further related material. A different, very nice introduction to POV-Ray and raytracing has been written by Gilles Tran.