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)
Some links for POV-Ray Go (sorted from the best on top to not so best on bottom):
http://www.loria.fr/~rougier/artwork.html#the-ancient-art-of-go
- 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
goboard.inc
- secretmojo's python tool "senseis2pov" allows to render photorealistic SL diagrams, included in the package.
http://stone.midway.hu/?gallery=PovRay
- Stone's renderings.
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?