Here are some examples:

   +D0H Auto detect the VGA display type and display the image to the
        screen as it's being worked on. Use the 15-bit HiColor chip and
        dithering to display more than 32,000 colors on screen.
   +D4  Display to a TSENG 4000 chipset VGA using the 332 palette option.
   +D4H Display to a TSENG 4000 chipset VGA using the HiColor option.
   +DG0 Display to a VESA VGA adapter and use the HSV palette option.
   +DG3 Display to a VESA VGA adapter and use the 332 palette option.
   +DGH Display to a VESA VGA adapter and use the HiColor option for
        over 32,000 colors.
   +DGT Display to a VESA VGA adapter and use the TrueColor option for
        over 16 million colors.

Note that your VESA BIOS must support these options in order for you to use them. Some cards may support HiColor and/or TrueColor at the hardware level but not through their VESA BIOS.

The following sections explain the features in roughly the same order as they are described in the reference guide.

The left-handed coordinate system (the z-axis is pointing away).

This kind of coordinate system is called a left-handed coordinate system. If we use our left hand's fingers we can easily see why it is called left-handed. We just point our thumb in the direction of the positive x-axis, the index finger in the direction of the positive y-axis and the middle finger in the positive z-axis direction. We can only do this with our left hand. If we had used our right hand we would not have been able to point the middle finger in the correct direction.

The left hand can also be used to determine rotation directions. To do this we must perform the famous Computer Graphics Aerobics exercise. We hold up our left hand and point our thumb in the positive direction of the axis of rotation. Our fingers will curl in the positive direction of rotation. Similarly if we point our thumb in the negative direction of the axis our fingers will curl in the negative direction of rotation.

"Computer Graphics Aerobics" to determine the rotation direction.

In the above illustration, the left hand is curling around the x-axis. The thumb points in the positive x direction and the fingers curl over in the positive rotation direction.

The first include statement reads in definitions for various useful colors. The second include statement reads in some useful shapes. The next read pre-defined finishes, glass, metal, stone and wood textures. It is a good idea to have a look through them to see but a few of the many possible shapes and textures available.

We should only include files we really need in our scene. Some of the include files coming with POV-Ray are quite large and we should better save the parsing time and memory if we don't need them. In the following examples we will only use the colors.inc, finish.inc and stones.inc include files so we will better remove the appropriate lines from our scene file.

We may have as many include files as needed in a scene file. Include files may themselves contain include files, but we are limited to declaring includes nested only ten levels deep.

We add the following camera statement to the scene.

Briefly, location <0,2,-3> places the camera up two units and back three units from the center of the ray-tracing universe which is at <0,0,0>. By default +z is into the screen and -z is back out of the screen.

Also look_at <0,1,2> rotates the camera to point at the coordinates <0,1,2>. A point 5 units in front of and 1 unit lower than the camera. The look_at point should be the center of attention of our image.

The first vector specifies the center of the sphere. In this example the x coordinate is zero so it is centered left and right. It is also at y=1 or one unit up from the origin. The z coordinate is 2 which is five units in front of the camera, which is at z=-3. After the center vector is a comma followed by the radius which in this case is two units. Since the radius is half the width of a sphere, the sphere is four units wide.

The color we define is the way we want an object to look if fully illuminated. If we were painting a picture of a sphere we would use dark shades of a color to indicate the shadowed side and bright shades on the illuminated side. However ray-tracing takes care of that. We pick the basic color inherent in the object and POV-Ray brightens or darkens it depending on the lighting in the scene. Because we are defining the basic color the object actually has rather than how it looks the parameter is called pigment.

The values after each keyword should be in the range from 0.0 to 1.0. Any of the three components not specified will default to 0. A shortcut notation may also be used. The following produces the same shade of pink:

to the scene file to get our first complete POV-Ray scene file as shown below.

If our computer does not use the command line, we have to read the platform specific docs for the correct command to render the scene.

We may also set any other command line options we like. The scene is written to the image file demo.tga (or some suffix other than .tga if our computer uses a different default file format).

The scene we just traced isn't quite state of the art but we will have to start with the basics before we soon get to much more fascinating features and scenes.

We create a new file called focaldem.pov and enter the following text

Now we can proceed to place our focal blur camera to an appropriate viewing position. Straight back from our three objects will yield a nice view. Adjusting the focal point will move the point of focus anywhere in the scene. We just add the following lines to the file:

The focal point is simply the point at which the focus of the camera is at its sharpest. We position this point in our scene and assign a value to the aperture to adjust how close or how far away we want the focal blur to occur from the focused area.

The aperture setting can be considered an area of focus. Opening up the aperture has the effect of making the area of focus smaller while giving the aperture a smaller value makes the area of focus larger. This is how we control where focal blur begins to occur around the focal point.