povray

Chainguard Container for povray

POV-Ray is a ray-tracing program that generates images from text-based scene descriptions.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The povray image provides a complete implementation of POV-Ray, the Persistence of Vision Raytracer. Notable characteristics:

• Contains POV-Ray with all standard include files and libraries
• Runs as a non-root user by default
• Does not include a shell or package manager in the production variant

Getting Started

POV-Ray renders 3D scenes described in text files with a .pov extension. The basic workflow involves creating a scene file and using POV-Ray to render it to an image.

To render a simple scene, first create a scene file:

cat > simple-scene.pov <<EOF
#version MAJOR.MINOR;

global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.0 }

camera {
  location <0, 1, -5>
  look_at <0, 0, 0>
  angle 35
}

light_source { <5, 10, -5> color rgb <1, 1, 1> }

sphere {
  <0, 0, 0>, 1
  pigment { color rgb <1, 0, 0> }
  finish { phong 0.9 }
}

plane {
  y, -1
  pigment { checker color rgb <0.8, 0.8, 0.8>, color rgb <0.2, 0.2, 0.2> }
}
EOF

Render the scene to a PNG image:

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scenes cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest \
  +I/scenes/simple-scene.pov +O/scenes/output.png +W640 +H480

This command mounts the current directory as /scenes in the container and renders the scene file to output.png with a resolution of 640x480 pixels.

Common Command Options

POV-Ray accepts many command-line options for controlling the rendering process:

# Render with anti-aliasing for smoother edges
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scenes cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest \
  +I/scenes/scene.pov +O/scenes/output.png +W800 +H600 +A

# Render with specific quality level (0-11, higher = better)
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scenes cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest \
  +I/scenes/scene.pov +O/scenes/output.png +W640 +H480 +Q9

# Render to different formats
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scenes cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest \
  +I/scenes/scene.pov +O/scenes/output.tga +FT +W640 +H480

Working with Include Files

POV-Ray scenes often use include files for reusable components. The image includes standard POV-Ray libraries:

cat > textured-scene.pov <<EOF
#version MAJOR.MINOR;
#include "colors.inc"
#include "stones.inc"

global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.0 }

camera {
  location <0, 2, -5>
  look_at <0, 0, 0>
  angle 35
}

light_source { <5, 10, -5> color White }

sphere {
  <0, 0, 0>, 1
  texture { T_Stone25 }
}
EOF

Render the scene that uses standard textures:

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/scenes cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest \
  +I/scenes/textured-scene.pov +O/scenes/textured.png +W640 +H480 +A

Configuration

Volume Mounts

Mount your scene files directory to /scenes to make them accessible to POV-Ray:

docker run --rm -v /path/to/your/scenes:/scenes cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/povray:latest \
  +I/scenes/myscene.pov +O/scenes/rendered.png

Documentation and Resources

• POV-Ray Official Documentation

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.