The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description.

It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers.

[7][8] Features of the application, and a summary of its history, are discussed in a February 2008 interview with David Kirk Buck and Chris Cason on episode 24 of FLOSS Weekly.

Recent versions of the software include the following features: One of POV-Ray's main attractions is its large collection of third-party-made assets and tools.

It is also a useful reference for those wanting to learn how ray tracing and related 3D geometry and computer graphics algorithms work.

POV-Ray, in addition to standard 3D geometric shapes like tori, spheres, and heightfields, supports mathematically defined primitives such as the isosurface (a finite approximation of an arbitrary function), the polynomial primitive (an infinite object defined by a 15th order or lower polynomial), the julia fractal (a 3-dimensional slice of a 4-dimensional fractal), the superquadratic ellipsoid (an intermediate between a sphere and a cube), and the parametric primitive (using equations that represent its surface, rather than its interior).

On the other hand, script-based primitive modeling is not always a practical method to create certain objects, such as realistic characters or complex man-made artifacts like cars.

Those objects can be created first in mesh-based modeling applications such as Wings 3D and Blender, and then they can be converted to POV-Ray's own mesh format.

It demonstrates the use of a background colour, camera, lights, a simple box shape having a surface normal and finish, and the transforming effects of rotation.

To accompany this feature set, third parties have developed a large variety of modeling software, some specialized for POV-Ray, others supporting import and export of its data structures, including the free and open-source 3D creation suite Blender.