POV-Ray (short for Persistance of Vision ray-tracer) is one of the best pieces of software that can be found on the internet.  And it's free!

POV-Ray, and other ray-tracers, generate (or render) photo-realistic images from 3d virtual environments.  Ray-tracers differ from other rendering programs in that they reflect and refract images realistically.  You pay a cost in the speed of the render process.  So see some examples of what POV-Ray can do, check out my image gallery and also the Internet Ray-Tracing Competition (IRTC).

POV-Ray is created by the POV-Ray team, and is supported by a worldwide community of users.  Here are some important sites to look at related to POV-Ray:

If you have any comments, please email me. My email address is "contact at nkopp dot mailshell dot com".