POV-Ray competition winners.

[NutWrench]

Here are the top 25 entries (http://www.povcomp.com/entries/) in the 2004 competition. I used PovRay and a 500k scene file to generate this image, which I'm currently using as my desktop background. (I didn't design it, I just rendered it).

It's a really nice raytracer and it's free for personal use.

[Night Hacker]

Wow!

The 1st, 2cnd and 10th entries really blew me away.

I have alot of respect for anyone that create something that good with Pov-Ray. I don't know if I'll ever take the time to learn to use that program.

Excellent link anyhow, thanks! I love this sort of stuff.

[NutWrench]

The Kitchen one is incredible. Several of the winning entries have a link to the source scene files if you want to render a scene yourself.

[Night Hacker]

Really?! I never noticed that.

I just took a look, they describe how they created them as well, that's the kind of stuff I like to read. There is source for the winning entry, I may download and render that one myself.

I just took a quick look at the intorduction on using POV Ray, I may give it a try, but I doubt I'll ever get that good! heh. I have been meaning to try that program out for years now and have never gotten around to it. I usually end up playing with TrueSpace 3.2 (free download).

I can see the advatages of POV Ray once you got used to using it though.

[NutWrench]

There's some even more impressive stuff here. (http://www.cgtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=121)
(Not POV-Ray)

Check this out. This is a render!

[TerminX]

http://images.povcomp.com/entries/images/96_main.jpg

The way it's rendered gives you the illusion of a camera panning up/down if you let it fully load, start at the top or bottom and hold down the arrow key to scroll. It's neat.

[DudeMiester]

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=233460

These mind-blowingly photorealistic renders, YES renders, were created with this renderer (www.maxwellrender.com). You have to check out their gallery, I've never seen anything like it! Also, from what I can tell, in addition to representing all light an a spectral for as it should be (unlike RGB), their core GI algorithm seems to be some form of Metropolis Light Transport (see http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/pdemoreu/mlt.html and http://www.3dvirtualight.com/mlt/ ). In any case the results are outstanding, and very good visually despite the noise even with short render times.