I began with simple spheres and cubes and gradually progressed to more intricate shapes and textures. Here are the results:

https://github.com/susam/pov25

The source code is in the "src/" directory. The rendered images are included in the README (scroll down to see them). I hope you like them!

And the extreme excitement the day I upgraded to a 486 dx 33/66 Mhz which, thanks to the math co-processor, rendered those same scenes in (10s of) minutes instead!!

Some of my first programming was writing QBasic programs to generate povray scene files.

I used it to do camera pans, lighting effects, etc.

On the other hand, if I wake up in the middle of the night due to HDD grinding, I was sure that I have new mail (echoareas) to read!

This was in the days of DOS where you could only run one program at a time. It would run all night and then in the morning he would stop it so he could use the computer for other things. But he had some kind of Targa .tga file utility to merge the files together.

Then he compiled povray for our Sun workstations and he would split up the rendering so that each machine would render 50 lines of the image and he could merge them together with that utility.

I remember how happy he was that he could render stuff 20 times faster.

It’s honestly really satisfying to use.

I imagine a lot of people can use it. I made dice with it already.

https://www.henryschmale.org/2022/02/22/povray-dice.html

I also spotted your openxcom play from 6 years ago and must confess that I am playing it these days!

I have only done 3D work as a waxing and waning hobby, but then, and to this day, the POV-Ray scripting interface seems like one of the more natural ways to define a scene to me.

Then in 1996 or 1997 I thought it would be fun to use it in a professional context at the software company I worked at, making a 3D animated GIF version of one of the product logos which I put on the web site (FWIW it looks like the 3D non-animated version is still visible on the Internet Archive Way Back Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/19971211003918/http://www.sophos... 27 years later). Although no-one had asked for it, I was still in effect getting paid to do something I used to do for fun, which felt good.

Even my fellow teachers struggled to grasp the humor of the thing. I suppose I'm a little strange.

We documented the process of installing Linux (Debian), configuring the network, compiling MPIPOV from source and clustering them together.

It was a thing of beauty to watch the rendering speeds increase and the blinkenlights putting on a show in that lab when we were done.

If I remember correctly they planned to take what we documented and use for a much larger cluster they were building, but never found out the specifics.

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/648136.748781

For me, POV-Ray and FractInt were the first real programs I read and understood. They were my C tutors.

Also, you've probably been raytracing too much if you're in this thread. And you probably know who David K. Buck is.

POV-Ray was my main hobby at the time, along with the community of the Raytech BBS in the UK, and defined so much of my interests going forward, through many 3D modelling and rendering packages.

Such a huge part of my younger years, and one of the biggest influences on my life overall.

This was in 1995.

The batch processing tools of that era for graphics were qualitatively different from the real time interactive editors. There is something to be said for the imperfect serendipity that would result. The closest thing these days, oddly, is ML training, where part of the appeal is the sense the computer is working super hard for you. Were you to recreate the same concepts on modern hardware you would do something like SDF CSG on GPUs, but it would be surprisingly interactive and so missing this surprise element.

Left the computer on for hours to get tiny pictures.

Adding a 387 was a huge step forward; IIRC approximately a 10x speedup.

For product design I use OpenSCAD. Maybe POV-Ray made this style of design popular.

A couple weeks ago I decided to use Blender for some 3D print modeling. I needed to make a wheel cap for my son, who had broken his. Although I love Blender I was disappointed when I wanted to update some things later in the design phase. Blender has some destructive editing that caused me grief. Perhaps you could avoid this with some additional mastery of the tool.

Unfortunately, I messed up some of the geometry in the animation, so while the A-Wing was rolling to one side, the two lights were rolling to the other side ;)

Which I of course only found out after a day or so, as renders were so slow (and this was something the size of a poststamp...)

Will POV-Ray render faster if I buy the latest and fastest 3D videocard?

    3D-cards are not designed for raytracing. They read polygon meshes and then scanline-render them. Scanline rendering has very little, if anything, to do with raytracing. 3D-cards can't calculate typical features of raytracing as reflections etc. The algorithms used in 3D-cards have nothing to do with raytracing.

    No, and most likely never will.

    POV-Ray 3.7.0 (released 6 November 2013) is the current official version for all platforms.

    There are significant internal changes in this version due to the introduction of SMP support.

That's a rather old statement. Nvidia and Apple GPUs have hardware-accelerated raytracing now. But even without specific raytracing features, lots of renderers use GPU compute for some of the raytracing workflow.

Never did get that far with either. If I recall, the problem with POV-Ray was getting the Blender file translated correctly for POV-Ray to render right, and while Yafray didn’t have the translation issue it was too slow to practically use on my little 400Mhz iMac G3.

It never even crossed my mind back then to directly write code for POV-Ray. At that point, in my teenage mind 3D was something you did with GUI software packages like Strata 3D and Blender.

I only had a ruler to use for measurements of the head shape and the face and it took me quite a while, but it came out better than any other LEGO render I ever saw during that time. I was quite proud of it for such a simple thing.

Overall I thin POV-Ray overtook it.

Going from 512x512 to 1024x1024 was a quadratic explosion in time to render in radiance. Never worked out why.

I’d sit in my dad’s office at IBM and use his all powerful PC-AT steel full tower PC.

It was so cool to even render simple stuff back then. Amazing to see this project still around.

We were using MNM (midnight modeler) and POVRay to create some cool 3D models on my schools 386 computers.

I was dreaming of, one day, working at ILM. Good memories :)

Back then only pre-rendered cut-scenes could come close to having graphics like that, and I dreamed of the day when games actually look like that realtime.

Kinda ironic that now that games actually do look like that (if not even better), I prefer to play retro pixel-art indie games, which actually put their focus on gameplay instead of graphics.

perl + povray + rsh = distributed rendering!

Open source meant it was possible for an Average Person with No Budget to do CGI animations and stills.

Some of those renders even found their way into a project I did in school for CAD class.

Edit: My old scripts are no longer compatible. :(

Edit2: The -MV option is your friend. :)

Yeah, modern machines are fast. Trace Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds (0.126 seconds)

I seem to recall this render taking a couple of minutes on my old machine.

As I have said before on this forum, we need a way to price in the whole lifecycle of manufacturing through to waste and punishments for behaviour like Purdue and the opioid crisis should be the loss of all wealth generated by such dark behaviour.

of course this is also unworkable, but I am not personally certain what is workable without a secular moral revolution.

A neoliberal economy wastes talent and skill in much the same way an ICE wastes most of the energy from the gas it burns. Vested interests clog up the engine and keep it from running cleanly and efficiently.

This doesn't just create pollution of all kinds - physical, social, political, and ecological - which makes the environment a very unpleasant space for most humans.

It also puts a hard cap on the maximum speed, which is nowhere close to what's possible.

We have tried central planning, and it resulted in horrendous living standards (as compared to the western world), queues all-night-long that you had to wait in if you wanted to buy bread in the morning, "if you're not stealing from your employer, you're stealing from your family" being adopted as a common proverb, and the whole system basically running (for some definition of running) on bribes, favors and theft. Communism finally fell around '89 in most of Eastern Europe, and we're still recovering.

Perhaps you could solve some of these points with computer-aided optimization and dystopian AI-powered mass surveillance, but is that really what we want?

In my view, the problem isn't capitalism, the problem is the government trying to fix capitalism, but instead making it much harder for small competitors to emerge, effectively causing almost-government-mandated monopolies.

Think about what industries are complained about most in America, and how regulated those industries are. You can't just lay fiber, make medications or help patients without going through a regulatory minefield, mostly for good reasons, but this is why the big providers of these services aren't outcompeted by smaller ones. There's a reason why the mostly-unregulated big tech is considered to be one of the most trustworthy industries among most (non ideologically motivated) consumers, far surpassing any political party.

Capitalism is sometimes bad, central planning is worse, but heavily regulated capitalism is the worst of them all.

There are many different models. Look at Elinor Ostrom's work, or projects using participatory budgeting.

I’d go back for nostalgia, but not for practical purposes. Even in the 2000s it was much harder to find information. Wikipedia didn’t launch until 2001, and wasn’t useful till long after.

Sometimes I wonder, what is current / next thing that's like the PC / BBS / early internet scene of the 90s, with such a rich ecosystem of innovation, hobbyists, open source / shareware, where one or two people in a garage have as much of a chance of changing the direction as any entrenched company?

At least from the outside, the bitcoin scene of the early-mid 2010s looked like that - although there was plenty of dumb hype about the "product" itself, there was also of opportunity for innovation with mining, exchanges, and trading setups.

What seems like it could be the next such scene?

OTOH... we now have sci-hub.se with high-quality professional scientist papers.