POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision Raytracer is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating three-dimensional graphics.

The goban image on the front page of SL is rendered with POV-Ray.

-- Bisqwit 2003-10-23

wms: The KGS "splash screen" and web graphics were made with POV ray. If you tell POV ray to use an infinite-zoom-infinitely-far-away camera (can't remember what POVray calls this, it's the camera setting where the rendering rays are all parallel to each other instead of emanating from a single point near the image), then you can get nice images that look "flat" on a web page instead of having perspective. POVray is very handy for this sort of thing, but of course has its limits; the actual boards in KGS are generated programmatically to make sure different sizes can be generated without having pixelization due to scaling errors.

gimpf: POVRay has its limits, but what has this to do with procedural textures? (btw, I think you meant the orthogonal camera)

zpmorgan: Here is my attempt at go stones suitable for a computer program. It is based on code from Nicolas Rougier.

Some links for POV-Ray Go (sorted from the best on top to not so best on bottom):

http://www.loria.fr/~rougier/artwork/index.html

totally wonderful pictures by Nicolas Rougier, the best what I have seen

http://warp.povusers.org/pics/

the image from SL frontpage

http://objects.povworld.org/cat/Toys/for_Adults/

here you can download macro for making simple goban

http://www.3dgo.org/ Eric Piotrovski

the sad thing is that the stones look very flat

http://tasuki.tasuki.org/pics/povray/goban.png (dead link)

tasuki's try

http://stone.midway.hu/?gallery=PovRay (dead link)

Stone's renderings.

http://shadowjack.weiqi.ru/files/3d_goban_1.jpg

my (shadowjack's) try.

axd: I have the impression that the jpeg compression does not work well together with the fine wood grain; the vertical goban lines seem to interact with the wood lines. Maybe a higher resolution, or a different angle (or file format) might solve that?

Tenchi: I did my own POV-Ray scene, along with a python script for generating a POV-Ray scene for any .sgf game at any position. I post it here since I don't know where to insert it (the links are sorted by best to not so best): ; http://tenchi.me/site/index.php?p=pov_goban (dead link)