# POV-Ray renderer

This rendering backend of OVITO invokes the external POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision Raytracer) program to generate images of the scene. POV-Ray must be installed on the computer if you want to use this rendering backend. It is available free of charge under an Open Source license on all platforms.

Every time an image of a viewport is being rendered, the rendering backend automatically saves the visible scene objects to a temporary file, which is then processed by the POV-Ray program. Once POV-Ray has finished, the rendered image is read back into OVITO.

Note that you can also save the current scene to a `.pov` file using OVITO's file export function. This allows you to render the exported scene through POV-Ray at a later time or on a different machine.

The omnidirectional stereo projection option, which requires POV-Ray 3.7.1 or newer, allows to create stereoscopic 360-degree VR videos.