Skip to content

Comment on Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: 25 scenes in 25 days (2013)parent

Comments

Unrelated but might trigger a few memories on here: I managed to get a copy of povray on one of those freeware cd-roms that computer stores often sold for a few dollars (since the internet wasn't a thing yet and getting it from compuserve was tricky). I think I sunk years of my life rendering beginners geometry, all the usuals: snowmen (spheres!), tables of still life geometry, basic animal characters and lots of snow scenes or rippling water sunsets (povray was particularly good for these.)

Lol, seems I have somehow actually been remembering the forerunner DKBTrace or something. Sometime around 1989 I had it on my Amiga from a Fred Fish PD software disk. Even on my buffed out A1000 (68020 14Mhz 4MB) it took a long time to make a picture. So since I was student working for the university computing services department... I shanghaied a whole user room of Sun 3/50s (it was closed for the night) and had like 20 workstations each doing a single slice of an image. Much faster. Then my account was disabled and I had to go talk to Security about misuse of computer resources. heh. Good times.

That's probably where I got it from too, as I used it pre-Internet.

It's funny to think I had to leave my 286 on all night to get a single 320x200 render like those in OP's link. Now you can render scenes like that in realtime.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.