The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray tracing program which generates images from a text-based scene description, and is available for a variety of computer platforms. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for the Amiga computers.

There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer contributed by its author Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software with the source code available under the AGPLv3.

POV-Ray has matured substantially since it was created. Recent versions of the software include the following features:

1. a Turing-complete scene description language (SDL) that supports macros and loops[9]
2. library of ready-made scenes, textures, and objects
3. support for a number of geometric primitives and constructive solid geometry
4. several kinds of light sources
5. atmospheric effects such as fog and media (smoke, clouds)
6. reflections, refractions, and light caustics using photon mapping
7. surface patterns such as wrinkles, bumps, and ripples, for use in procedural textures and bump mapping
8. radiosity
9. image format support for textures and rendered output, including TGA, PNG, JPEG among others
10. extensive user documentation

One of POV-Ray's main attractions is its large collection of third party support. A large number of tools, textures, models, scenes, and tutorials can be found on the web. It is also a useful reference for those wanting to learn how ray tracing and related geometry and graphics algorithms work.

For more information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POV-Ray