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Miscellaneous, Odds & Ends 
 POV-Ray Tips, 
 Tricks, and Techniques
Six Pitfalls to Avoid 
 
Simon Smith provides a few reminders about  common pitfalls: 1. #declared variables are case sensitive - if you use a variable called Fred, it won't work if you refer to it as FRED somewhere else. 

2. Colours are case sensitive too.  All the standard POV-Ray colours use proper case, e.g. Red, Orange, DarkGrey etc. 

3. If you create a scene with two mirrors reflecting off one another, you will probably need to increase max_trace_level (Manual, section 7.8.6), and you should use a value of less than one for the reflectiveness of the mirrors.  (e.g. 'reflection 0.95') 

4. If you don't want the background colour of a scene (the colour of rays that don't hit anything) to be black, you can use the background_colour option to change this.  (Manual, section 7.7.2) 

5. In order to use all POV-Ray's predefined colours, shapes and textures, you must '#include' them in the file.  This means having 

#include "colors.inc" 
#include "textures.inc" 

and so on right at the start of the scene.  Note also that because some of the include files use values given in other include files, the order you give them in matters. 

6. Heightfields are black by default, and therefore need to be given a suitable texture.  As they consist of triangles, they also do not always work correctly when used in CSG. 
 
 
  
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