POV-Ray

After almost a year the first release candidate of "Yet Another POV-Ray Modeller" 0.7 is available, featuring a switch to gtkmm, reworked look and feel and more efficient modelling process.

French mathematician Xavier Caruso and Jos Leys have used POV-Ray to explain three common effects of refraction in their short film "But where is the shallow end?". It's released under Creative Commons license and can be viewed online here.

A new version of "Yet Another POV-Ray Modeller" is available with bug fixes, a new interactive 3D View viewport (allowing you to view your scene from any angle and assign the current view to the active camera), a wider range of 3D file formats supported for import and inline editing of objects.

An excellent tutorial on using the sphere_sweep object has been made available. The Sphere Sweep Tutorial (also available in German) provides a general introduction followed by increasingly more complex applications of the object, with illustrated examples, code and scene files.

A new POV-Ray animation website has appeared with some interesting animation projects. The site, Animation Palace, has downloadable projects you can render, as well as examples and other interesting info.