Whats new with POVRay 3.5?

Lots of stuff - have a look at the POVRay 3.5 features page for a complete listing. In short, POVRay 3.5 incorporates a lot of the changes from MegaPOV, a POVRay derivative/add-on. For some pics of what the new POVRay can do, check out the POVRay UK site.

Looks good - but how is it related to POVScript+?

The biggest change that users will notice is the change in the camera settings. Whereas you may be used to a right handed coordinate system, POVRay 3.5 is much more stringent about camera settings, and thus older versions of POVScript+ (1.4 and previous) generate left handed images. If this is a problem, you can change the "direction" vector in the camera settings to something like the following:
camera {
         location < 0, 0, 24 >
         direction < 0, 0, -1 >
         up < 0, 1, 0 >
         right < 1, 0, 0 >
         look_at < 0, 0, 0 >
       }
One other thing - as of POVScript+ 1.65, "drawsurf" commands (for GRASP and MSMS maps) use the POVRay 3.5 specific "mesh2" object (see a description here). This allows triangles to be colored based on a vertex (rather than the entire triangle) basis. Check out the GRASP example page to see how this affects the rendering.

Other than that, most of the POVScript+ stuff should work fine in the new version of POVRay.

I want an orthographic projection, but it changes the zoom!

In the case of orthographic projections, POVRay 3.5 uses the up and right vectors of the camera settings to determine the image size. To fix this, set the camera similar to the following:
camera {
         orthographic
         location < 0, 0, 24 >
         direction < 0, 0, -1 >
         up < 0, 24, 0 >
         right < 24, 0, 0 >
         look_at < 0, 0, 0 >
       }
And the image should come out the way you want it to.
Go back to the povscript+ home page