POV-Ray variants
There exists various unofficial POV-Ray versions featuring new functionalities and/or optimizations. These versions, unsupported by the POV-Team, are called variants.
POV-Ray's development is not fast. You should have to wait many years between two major versions of the raytracer. This is not true, fortunately, for the bug corrections. As the source code has been made available, the Web now shows numerous "patches" unsupported by the POV-Team.
The purpose of these variants could merely be the correction of bugs, benchmark optimization for some functions, addition of new features, port of POV-Ray for a new software platform and even the coding of render farms. Theorically, all these variants could work for GNU/Linux but most has only been tested for Windows. In this webpage, we will deal only with the main variants working with GNU/Linux.
Variants with new features
- Megapov
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This variant is a in fact a collection of many different patches. Before the release of the 3.5 version of POV-Ray, some users even thought of it as better than the original. Now, it has new features and stay fully compatible with the peculiar langages of both POV-Ray 3.5 Megapov 0.7.
- POVMan
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This variant lets you make use of Renderman's shaders with POV-Ray. It includes the Clothray variant which enables you to simulate clothes based on a rectangular shape. (cf. Megapov). POVMan is not based on POV-Ray but on Megapov 0.6.
![[en]](images/en.png)
The render farms
The render farms let you dispatch the calculation load of the picture on many computers in order to reduce rendering time. In the case of POV-Ray, this an important issue because even with very powerful computers, some scenes very complex could take hours (and even dozen of hours) to get rendered.
Moreover, the official version of POV-Ray in only mono-CPU. This means that if you have hardware with 2 or more CPUs, only one will be used by POV-Ray to render the picture. Apart from being multi-computers, these variants can fully take advantage from multiple CPUs.
- PVMPov
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PVMPov uses PVM's features in order to dispatch the calulculating load among many computers or CPUs. The stable version of PVMPov is based on the 3.1 version of POV-Ray. A new, but less stable, version does exist, and is based on the 3.5 version of POV-Ray.
- MPI-POVRAY
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Based on PVMPov, this piece of software doesn't make use of PVM but uses MPI's features (another system for dispatching loads of many computers). The latest version is based on POV-Ray 3.1g.
- PVMegaPOV
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Also based on PVMPov, this piece of software is based on MegaPOV 0.6 or 0.7.
- KPovModeler
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Much more than a good modelling tool, KPovModeler will very soon offer (currently in the CVS version) a distributed rendering through a NetSolve client, with a mosaic view of the pic's part already rendered.