I'm hardly an artist.

In fact, I'm not even close to resembling something that somebody might generously call artistic. My best freehand approximation of a straight line is more like... well... the back of a camel. Yet drawing is something that I truly aspire to be good at. So when I can get a little help from a computer I don't turn away the opportunity. Enter POV-Ray, the persistence of vision ray tracer.

To use POV-Ray you write a description of your scene in an easy to learn Scene Description Language or SDL, which vaguely resembles the C programming language. Then POV-Ray processes the scene description to produce an image.

This is what I, a complete amateur, produced after about an hour of playing with SDL:


If you want to see what real artists can do with POV-Ray I suggest you check out their Hall of Fame gallery. Warning: be sure your chin is over a soft surface. It will drop.