The Persistence of Vision Ray tracer creates three-dimensional,
photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray tracing.
It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and
lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view
point of a camera also described in the text file. Ray tracing is not
a fast process by any means, (the generation of a complex image can
take several hours) but it produces very high quality images
with realistic reflections, shading, perspective, and other effects.
POV-Ray is a free, full-featured ray tracer.