It’s an old copy, and the installation needs some finagling, but it renders!
oxben.free.fr/povray-beos.html
After installing, I didn’t see POV come up in the list of applications. So I copied povray binary to a new folder on Desktop, pov31. Then copied the a test file, chess2.pov. Then copied the 9 required inc files. Then started the render:
povray +Ichess.pov +D
It runs and outputs chess2.png. I’m pretty sure that this can be simplified by reading the README, and maybe we can put this in a more modern Haiku package for installation.
Plus now that PovRay 3.7 had switched to Boost-thread, and that we have Boost port, compiling v3.7 from source may be more easy.
What missing under Haiku (well, not only) is some app that would monitor a .pov file and on change will fire a rendering in thumbnail size to display it. That would be a neat pov live preview display feature, very handy.
Otherwise, maybe LuxRender could be ported to Haiku as well.
Didn’t check the requirements, but LuxRender seems far more trendy these days, support distributed rendered and has already OpenCL hardware acceleration support too (for plateforms which has such support, aka not Haiku alas).
I’ll take a look at Persistence of Textures, thanks! I did spend a little time trying to port POV 3.8 Beta and had a problem with the Boost libs. Can’t remember the problem. It might have been a missing feature on Haiku 2 years ago. I may try to add native Haiku treads to POV, with some real time viewing features.
This Haiku version, 3.7.0.8-2, supports multiple processors (SMP). OpenEXR (HDR) and Radiance image file formats are supported. I’ve tested the povray benchmarking up to 64 threads (povray -benchmark +wt128, simulated for 128 threads) for stability on Haiku x86_gcc2. Benchmarking takes about one hour on an old 2010 laptop with a 1.7Ghz x86 CPU. Thanks to alaviss, extrowerk, korli, and Begasus for their help as well.
NOTE: As for POV-Ray 3.8.0 (experimental beta), Haiku doesn’t support Intel AXV-512 at the time of this writing.
There are several mag articles and books for POV-Ray also in Japanese, French:
Linux Journal Magazine November 2004 Issue 127 - Visualizing Giant Data Sets With POV- Ray
ASIN: B07MYPS2MV
Ray Tracing Worlds With Pov-Ray
ISBN-10: 1878739646, ISBN-13: 978-1878739643
Blender and POV-Ray 3D in complete freedom (French)
ISBN-10: 2100493949, ISBN-13: 978-2100493944
POV-Ray Introduction to Be the first to start a 3DCG (Japanese)
ISBN-10: 4274207331 , ISBN-13: 978-4274207334
POV-Ray Practice Computer Graphics - CG certification Curriculum (Japanese)
ISBN-10: 4756133673, ISBN-13: 978-4756133670
Metasequoia and POV-Ray start 3DCG (Japanese)
ISBN-10: 4871937208, ISBN-13: 978-4871937207
POV-Ray to start rayracing [revised 2nd edition] (Japanese)
ISBN-10: 4756130984, ISBN-13: 978-4756130983
POV-Ray of tanoshimu gurafu korekushon (Japanese)
ISBN-10: 4777513475, ISBN-13: 978-4777513475
Raytrace!: The Official Pov-Ray Cdrom : Create Your Own 3-D Images With This Cdrom