What is POV-Ray for Unix?

### 1.1.2 What is POV-Ray for Unix?

POV-Ray for Unix is POV-Ray, ported to Unix or a Unix-like operating system such as GNU/Linux. It contains all the features of POV-Ray itself, plus some others specific to Unix, more specifically the X Window System. The additional features do not affect the core rendering code. All of the other additional features relate to making the program easier to use under X.

An extensive discussion of the POV-Ray 3 Scene Description Language can be found elsewhere in this help file.

#### 1.1.2.1 ... And What Is It Not?

POV-Ray for Unix is not a modeller. It will not let you design scenes graphically on-screen. There are several shareware and freeware programs available for this purpose. To write or modify POV-Ray scenes you just edit the actual text file containing the commands.

New users might be surprised to learn that, although this sounds primitive, it is in fact one of the things that gives POV-Ray so much power and flexibility. There are many other rendering programs that give you a point-and-click interface, but when it comes down to absolute control of your scene, it's hard to beat a text-based scene description language (even though it's harder for some to learn).