Persistence of Vision Raytracer (or POV-Ray), is a ray-tracing program that generates bitmap images from text files. On Ubuntu it is available as a command-line tool that may be installed via the software centre or by APT.
POV-Ray is a free and open-source ray-tracing program that is licensed under AGPLv3. On Ubuntu it is usually run from the command line, for example:
povray input.ini
Where this input.ini file is a text file containing the various options for the POV-Ray program, such as the POV file (extension: .pov) it is to render, the size of the bitmap image it should generate from this file (more specifically its width and height dimensions), whether it should use an alpha channel on this image (which would render its background transparent), where it should write its output file, etc.
It may be installed on Ubuntu via the software centre or by opening up a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T by default) and running:
sudo apt-get install povray
POV-Ray installed this way is usually up to date, for example on the 27 May 2015 on the latest version of Ubuntu available at the time (Vivid, 15.04), the version of POV-Ray installed by APT was the most recent one (3.7.0).
