Artwork -- POV-Ray Page

Well, sorry for the poorness of this page, in form as well in content.
I hope to improve it soon someday...
Not much to show currently, I will just babble about my 3D background and give some links to beef up a little this page :-)
Now (2002/08/06) with the Lua logo.

3D and Me

I always liked the beautiful images generated by computers. I am 40 (in 2002), and back to my young days, even drawings made by a tracer (a pen moving on a sheet of paper) were amazing... So 3D was gasping!
Although I am a computer engineer with a decent mathematical background, I quickly realized that 3D maths were way over my head, so I renounced to write my own software in the field...
I started to play with raytracing with DKB Trace, the ancestor of POV-Ray. I bought some diskettes for Atari ST 520, and started to play with it.
I was quickly frustrated by the slowness of image generation, so I recompiled the code on a Sun workstation: I had several unused next to me at my workplace... A little program to convert the output to Sun raster file, and I was able to see these beautiful images on a big color screen...
Later, I had a PC running Windows, and I played with POV-Ray, 1.0 or 2.0, I can't remember. It was before the coming of procedural handling of scenes, so to create complex scenes with repetitive elements, we had to create external programs (in Basic, C, whatever) that generated the POV-Ray file. Note that it is still doable, the generator can be much faster than the internal parser...
I tried a bit POV-Ray 3.1 but didn't found the time to learn the new features.
I downloaded POV-Ray 3.5 as soon as it was announced on Freshmeat, I tried a lot of files found on the Internet or the newsroups, but I still have to read the manual from start to end.
I will eventually do it, I am eager to hack some code and try out some ideas.

Lua logo

As an exercice, I have tried to make the Lua logo in POV-Ray.
Note: in Portuguese, lua means moon.
I think it is quite close to the original, a Postscript program.
Nice little CSG exercice, and my first real #while loop...
See my Lua page for more informations on the language...

You can see the code if you are interested.

Links from my bookmarks

Generic

IRTC
POV-Ray
The POV-Ray newsgroups
POV Texture Library 3.0
POV-Ray Objects Collection
POV-Ray questions and tips
POV-Ray Include Files
rune|vision :: 3d graphics
Isosurface Tutorial
The POV-Ray Cyclopedia
pov_eng - descriptions, tutorials and samples for POV-Ray
Shortest Code Contest
Shortest Code Contest 2
Persistence of Text

Programs and utilities

POV-Ray - the Persistence of Vision Raytracer
Friedemann's Software -- TextureView
Breeze Designer
Sonya's Page of POV Stuff
SW's POV Utility Review
Mark Mackey -- TorPatch
John Beale -- GForge & HF-lab
3D : POVLAB's Modeller
Smoke Generator
CrossRoads -- 3D formats cross-translation
Thomas Baier's 3DWin -- 3D formats cross-translations
Armanisoft -- Elefont & Spiralizer
BlobMaster
DMesh -- Human & Organic Models
Font3D
Castle Builder
HF-Lab & gForge
Patched POV -- WinMegaPOV
Gear mess
Gear Include File
Joerg Schrammel's Genesis Toolkit
Gordian (celtic) knots
Poet3-D Animation System
RockGen

Go to main page. Contact me, comment this

Created: 2002/07/26
Updated: 2002/08/06 (Minor update (links) : 2005/04/23)