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Details

Package ID
pov-ray
Version
3.7.0
Downloads
2103
Website
http://www.povray.org/

Summary

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, Free Software tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics.

Description

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray-tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file. Ray-tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects.

Licensing

This installs both the AGPL3-licensed application and the editor DLLs which implement the optional codemax code editor not covered by the AGPL3. The DLLs are provided pursuant to the license that applied to the previous version of POV-Ray (v3.62) and may only be used under those terms.

Note

The POV-ray installer has no option for system-wide installs, completely ignoring users other than the installing user. See here and here for details. Until the POV-ray developers resolve the problem, there are two (partial) work-arounds for multi-user systems:

  1. Include all required user files in the default user profile. This measurably slows down initial logins and increases (future) user profile size whether or not POV-Ray is used and does not make POV-Ray functional for other, existing users. POV-Ray will work regardless of the calling application (Explorer, etc.).
  2. Establish a “launcher” script. This does not touch the default user profile and works for existing and future users. However, if a user starts POV-Ray without using the script (e.g. from inside another application), it will be broken for that user going forward. Also, if registry editing is blocked, the POV-Ray application may not recognize the editor installation. These can (usually) be mitigated by configuring other applications to call POV-Ray via the script.

This Chocolatey package follows work-around (2). The “launcher” establishes necessary files/settings on first run, but as it is not official, it may not always function as expected. Testing is recommended. Some other Chocolatey packages for applications that can use POV-Ray may be designed to utilize the script. The package parameter (below) will have the package installer also follow work-around (1).

Package Parameters

The following package parameter can be set:

  • /default - The POV-Ray user files and settings will be included in the default user profile.

This parameter can be passed to the installer with the use of -params. For example : choco install pov-ray -params '"/Default"'

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