Ray Tracing

"Sometimes I amaze even myself."

I've had an on-again/off-again fascination with Ray Tracing over the years -- and specifically, with POV-Ray, the Persistence of Vision Raytracer. I have done very little with it since, oh, late 2002 -- in that time I've tackled NaNoWriMo 7 times (producing almost-three novels and various unfinished texts), I've built 9 HLDM maps of increasing complexity, I've played with the Half-Life SDK, learned a couple of programming languages, wrestled with databases, investigated CVS and its place in my world, and I've read a few books and watched countless DVDs.

The pendulum is swinging back, and -- despite the other projects I have on the go -- I find myself once more thinking about having a play with POV-Ray.

A little while back I dug out all my old POV work -- all that I could find, anyway -- and imported it in one fell swoop into my CVS repository for future reference. As I look through it now, I discover little gems which I had forgotten I'd been working on -- such as the classroom full of individually-poseable "children" (no modelling as such, they're simple CSG objects for the most part) that I don't think I ever actually rendered since I was still working on developing my "POVLIB/FIGURE/HUMAN" library of macros. Intriguingly, in one of the include files I find I've got #declare statements for raceCaucasian, raceAfrican, raceAsian, raceAmerInd (probably non-PC, but hey!) and, uh, raceVulcan! That's an image I want to play with again! It actually dates back to '97, and I vaguely remember taking a tape-measure to the child of a friend to get my proportions right!

Slightly more recently, there's my work on my chess-set library. I had four board types, two different chess sets (three if you count the "deluxe" option on one) with an additional set in development, and numerous predefined colour options -- before I lost interest. Out of that particular interest, I even bought a book on different chess set designs -- I was ambitious, if nothing else!

I shall, in the very near future, start uploading newly-rendered images of my old work to showcase what I had produced back then. After that -- if I don't lose interest again -- I'll possibly start producing some new stuff...

Watch this space!