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Raytracing is a very cool image rendering technique which 1) wastes a *lot* of CPU cycles, and 2) produces very realistic images. Or so they say. Anyway, when I have time to do it, it can get insanely fun, just like programming.
For a long time I used the Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray), which happens to be a very cool program. All was happy and rosy until I discovered that the license for POV-Ray is kind of evil. It does not allow you to use portions of the source code in other programs. If you modify the source code, it must be used for a new version of POV-Ray. And the license has all sorts of silly limitations (price for which you may sell copies of the program, etc.). This is definitely not good. Look here to see why.
Fortunately, I have found a very, very cool raytracer that is released
under the GPL. Oh joy.
The Scheme Aided Raytracer (SART) is a
very nice piece of software. It uses Guile as the Scheme
interpreter in which you write your scene code. This is
``The Staircase'' was my submission for the October 1995 Internet Raytracing Competition. It ranked third place (among about 40 images), and I am very proud of it.
Get the source code used to
render the image. It was written for POV-Ray 2.something.
This is one of my experiments in rendering parametric surfaces using POV-Ray 3.0's #while directives and such. Of course looping makes creating such images much easier.
Here is the source code used to render
the image. You can play with the variables which declare the number
of samples to use along the parametric curve, the number of turns, the
frequency of the waves, etc.
On 1996/12/10, having nothing better to do, I decided to make one of those ubiquitous ``Powered by'' web buttons. This one is about Linux, the One True OS, of course.
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Medium version (400x100 JPEG, 13.2 KB)
Get the source code if you want to render the buttons on your own. You can do whatever you want with the buttons and the source code.
Some pages related to this logo:
A long time ago I wrote some tutorial-type documents for version 2.x
of POV-Ray. They were published in the Usuario online magazine. They are
in Spanish, and although they are really outdated, some people find
them useful anyway. You can download them in a compressed tarball.
This page last updated: 1998/09/26 18:19:31
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