[HN Gopher] POV-Ray - The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
POV-Ray - The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)
Author : RafelMri
Score : 298 points
Date : 2024-06-11 06:36 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.povray.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.povray.org)
| icf80 wrote:
| this is old as me
|
| play it with a long time ago ~20 years
| falcor84 wrote:
| Would you mind sharing some detail?
| Aardwolf wrote:
| While I can't know what the parent-parent post meant, POV Ray
| is around for over 30 years and was popular in the early
| 2000's on the internet as well, and is fun to play around
| with, I remember people posting renderings on forums like
| gamedev.net etc...
| deepakg wrote:
| Also reminded me of the internet ray tracing competition
| https://www.irtc.org/ where many submissions would've been
| produced using POV Ray.
| schoen wrote:
| I really appreciate seeing things that are named after
| the Internet as part of the exuberance of being able to
| do or share them on a worldwide network. Naming something
| after the Internet itself is probably most common in the
| 1990s.
| bobim wrote:
| Participed once, and ranked low... I could only dream
| about the skill level of our french master Mr Tran.
| Nekorosu wrote:
| It's 29 years for me. It's my first 3D rendering software.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Me too, oof
| CodeCompost wrote:
| It's been a long time since I have looked at POV ray and my
| knowledge of it is woefully out of date, but does POV ray
| currently make use of hardware acceleration or is it still CPU
| bound?
| defrost wrote:
| By their FAQ: CPU, FPU, Bus speed, and Memory bound - in
| decreasing order of relevance.
|
| _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.
|
| _Does POV-Ray support 3DNow for faster rendering?_
| No, and most likely never will.
|
| https://wiki.povray.org/content/Knowledgebase:Miscellaneous
| 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.
|
| https://www.povray.org/download/
| jb1991 wrote:
| > 3D-cards are not designed for raytracing.
|
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| It dates back to 2013.
|
| I've merely quoted what the POX-Ray site has to say about
| it's own capabilities and beliefs at the time of writing.
| TapamN wrote:
| It's older than that. I remember that from ~2002, when I
| used POV-Ray for a class project.
| dagw wrote:
| POV-Ray itself dates back to the early 90s (and was based
| on code from the 80s). The FAQ in question was last
| updated 2013, and the paragraph about graphics cards is
| probably older than that.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Things have changed a bit since that was written. Of course
| nowadays Graphics cards _do_ permit somewhat arbitrary code
| to run, and can also be used by a ray tracing engine. Of
| course said engine has to be written to utilize them.
|
| For instance, the Cycles [1] engine in Blender.
|
| If you're into ray tracing as a hobby you have to play with
| it at least once! Cycles does probabilistic rendering and
| can handle tricky things like caustics.
|
| [1] https://www.cycles-renderer.org/
|
| [2] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles
| /gpu_...
|
| (edit) : TIL there's also Luxcorerender, which is also an
| engine that can render using GPU.
| https://luxcorerender.org/heterogeneous-computing/
| jb1991 wrote:
| Cycles is not the only one, about half of mainstream
| commercial 3D renderers are using the GPU for rendering
| now. Possibly more than that.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Are you telling me my 3dfx Voodoo card is useless?
| _joel wrote:
| Still in production... I guess :)
| https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=100871
| CiaranMcNulty wrote:
| I played with this a lot during my degree back in 97-99. A friend
| used it to render her final year project.
|
| Amazing to see it's still going!
| susam wrote:
| About 11 years ago, after having written a tiny ray tracer from
| scratch using Java, I taught myself some ray tracing with POV-
| Ray. My goal was to learn a few POV-Ray features each day over 25
| days and render some interesting scenes that exercise those
| features.
|
| 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!
| cl3misch wrote:
| I find the kaleidoscope surprisingly cool. In hindsight it's
| obvious but to get this out of a raytracer is somewhat
| unexpected to me.
|
| https://github.com/susam/pov25#Kaleidoscope
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It ran on Atari ST and I remember I had to let it run all night
| to get fancy reflective spheres in all their 320x200 glory.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Back in the 90's we had to leave our computers running all night,
| to get nice images out of POV-Ray, this brings back some
| memories.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| We wrote some small tools with Turbo Pascal to generate number
| of scene files, then rendered these to create small animations.
| Having a camera move over a reflective chessboard was pretty
| amazing.
| vergessenmir wrote:
| Showing my age here but povray is what got me into software
| engineering. I wrote a raytracer in Pascal + Assembly and then in
| C and ASM
|
| This was in 1995.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Having to write one for a class in college made me a master of
| pointers and C. Arrays within arrays rendering to Z buffers and
| crude matrix operators. Now all built into a nice lib and 3
| calls away.
| ABS wrote:
| I still remember when I used to leave my 386 sx 25Mhz running all
| night to render very simple scenes with POV-Ray (somehow sleeping
| through the loud fan noise!).
|
| 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!!
| LoganDark wrote:
| > somehow sleeping through the loud fan noise
|
| Sometimes white noise helps with sleep, so this may not be that
| big of a surprise.
| ABS wrote:
| yes, but that wasn't white noise I assure you :-D
| p_l wrote:
| Especially if there was classic IDE HDD grinding involved
| :D
| amlib wrote:
| I loved that deep scratchy bass, modern hard drives are
| so quiet... I miss sleeping to my computer defragging all
| night long :(
| doubled112 wrote:
| Not all modern drives. One of mine goes "thunk thunk
| thunk". I could hear it from rooms away in one case I had
| it in.
| blacklion wrote:
| I've had 24x7 FIDO node in my room for years. I've
| silenced modem pulse dialing by replacing relay with
| expensive one. I've silenced CPU cooler by using 90mm 12v
| fans connected to 5v (yes, in 486DX era). But HDD was
| unbeatable.
|
| 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!
| eru wrote:
| Pedantic nitpick: you are most likely talking about a
| different 'colour' of noise. White noise is really harsh, and
| probably not what your fan produces.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise
| entropyie wrote:
| Are you me? :-D Same story, had an AST 386 which I upgraded to
| a 486 DX33... I learned to program in the 90s by writing povray
| scene files, which taught me C style syntax and primed me to
| write actual C/C++/Java in the years that followed. I spent
| thousands of hours with povcad and povray on windows 3.1...
| ABS wrote:
| :-D I already knew (some) C, lots of Turbo Pascal and Basic
| by that time so I would generate povray scene files using a
| small C program I had developed which took various equations
| as starting point to plot spheres on the curves
| dayjah wrote:
| Hah, same except my dad showed me how to write a simple
| search and replace using a DOS batch script to generate
| many files to then pass into the renderer.
|
| I used it to do camera pans, lighting effects, etc.
| dcpit wrote:
| Stop showing off, guys ... ;-) About 30 years ago, I let my
| Atari 1040STF (8Mhz, no hard drive...) scratching a floppy
| disk all night long to render this very blob :
| http://csi.chemie.tu-
| darmstadt.de/ak/immel/graphics/povray35...
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| You ddos'ed your university home page. ;)
| prox wrote:
| No the Atari is still rendering to this day!
| andrehacker wrote:
| Maybe he'll get to use the "that would be impressive
| except if they had known what they were looking for,they
| would have seen it written on my dorm room window" quote
| later today.
| entropyie wrote:
| Lol, I also have some povray renders still online on my uni
| page... Not linking though ;-)
| technothrasher wrote:
| I feel like the privileged guy in the room, as I was
| running POV-Ray on a fancy new SPARCstation back in those
| days.
| chaboud wrote:
| Seems like the Atari was repurposed into doing duty as a
| webserver...
|
| (Kidding. Posting links on HN is basically a community load
| test.)
| jbl0ndie wrote:
| What were you modelling? Cyclopropane? I did something
| looking similar using a Fortran tool called Gaussian not
| long after.
| bfmalky wrote:
| Also are you me? Except I had a 486sx and I tried in vain to
| persuade my parents to buy a maths co-processor for it. It
| would have probably saved them money in the long run from
| electricity bills.
|
| Some of my first programming was writing QBasic programs to
| generate povray scene files.
| fullstop wrote:
| I had a 486dx and it was such a huge upgrade over a 286. I
| ordered pov-ray from some shareware catalog since I didn't
| have internet access, and it arrived on 3.5" floppies.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| What on earth this was me too!! I still remember leaving my
| 486 rendering all night after I had messed with the computer
| and disconnected the CPU fan. Several hours of sleep later
| there was a loud blaring alarm, because the CPU was about to
| overheat. It took like 4 hours to overheat! Can't remember
| what rendering tool it was though.
| CrLf wrote:
| My personal record was 50 hours for a single 640x480 scene on
| my Pentium 100 MHz. Memories...
| glimshe wrote:
| What 386 owner hasn't rendered that sample POV Ray scene with a
| glass of wine? It made me feel that my beloved computer could
| do "professional" graphics.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Then you would find the NCC-1701 from some BBS...
| glandium wrote:
| I didn't. I was too busy rendering that sample POV Ray scene
| with a sunset.
| thesnide wrote:
| my dad wanted to buy a 486sx, i convinced him to go for the
| more expensive dx for povray and factint...
|
| Yeah. I know now about the int in fractint :D
| stevage wrote:
| And then Terragen.
| Twirrim wrote:
| It was VistaPro, for me. So many hours of fiddling with
| variables, and rendering new worlds.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I spent so much time on VistaPro on my Amiga 1000. I
| later bought a 2000, then an 030+FPU card. I was a
| rendering madman for the next month.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| ahh. Fractint.
| mattanimation wrote:
| yes! I did the same thing, although I never got a 486 and
| jumped to a amd k6-2 with Blender when it came out. Never had
| the math co-processor either, although it would have been nice.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Same here! I still have some fairly simple 320x240 images that
| took all night to render.
| glonq wrote:
| I'm old [and stupid] enough to remember running a floating-
| point-only raytracer on a non-FP PC using a software-emulated
| math coprocessor. I think I measured output in *hours per
| frame*.
| _whoDis wrote:
| Moray modelling program in Dos. Fun times
| mycall wrote:
| Color cycle mode was so rave too.
| rffn wrote:
| Ah, the memories. First DKB Trace, then the newly renamed POV-
| Ray.
|
| Left the computer on for hours to get tiny pictures.
|
| Adding a 387 was a huge step forward; IIRC approximately a 10x
| speedup.
| kqr wrote:
| Many years ago I asked one of my role models how he had made some
| pre-rendered sprites for a game, and he told me it was with POV-
| Ray, but that he did not recommend it because it used its
| scripting language to define scenes, which he was concerned would
| be too complicated for someone who has not done 3D work before.
|
| 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.
| prideout wrote:
| I created all the sprites to my game, "Noop's Odyssey", using
| POV-Ray. My game was one of the games on a "100 Shareware
| Games" CD-ROMs.
| masswerk wrote:
| Here are some game characters, I did with POV-Ray, and it was
| great for such things!
|
| https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze-FamilyPortrait.ht...
|
| (See the link at the bottom for the game, yet another Pac-Man
| clone. Mind that pixels where still bigger, then.)
| usrusr wrote:
| The POV-ray syntax with its wild mix of curly and whitespace
| state description driven by a C-preprocessor lookalike
| successfully primed my mind for making the jump from Basic and
| Pascal to C (and eventually to other curly languages). Eternally
| grateful, also to the IRTC that made me spend enough time with
| the syntax to have a strong learning effect.
| opentokix wrote:
| It's been a minute since I heard pov-ray mentioned :D - Had fun
| playing around with it in the early 2000s
| sztanko wrote:
| Are there any modern alternatives to POV-Ray?
| dagw wrote:
| Depends what you mean? If you want a modern high performance
| ray tracer with support for all the latest hardware and
| implementing all the cutting edge ray tracing research, there
| is Embree and OptiX. They don't however come with their own
| scene description language, which is what made POV-Ray so
| popular in the first place.
| sztanko wrote:
| I was thinking for some python (or similar language) api for
| Ray tracer that doesn't have a steep learning curve and is
| easy to use.
| kristianp wrote:
| https://mitsuba.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html
|
| There seems to exist python front ends to embree. How good
| this one is, I don't know.
| zokier wrote:
| OpenUSD is probably the closest thing in terms of scene
| description? You have both Python Api and human-readable
| ascii format
| _pferreir_ wrote:
| Doesn't Blender's main rendering engine, Cycles, sort of use
| ray tracing (path tracing, I believe)?
| jlarocco wrote:
| What's wrong with using POV-Ray?
| opentokix wrote:
| Yes, you can use renderman https://renderman.pixar.com/install
| mobiuscog wrote:
| I think it was in 1994 that I posted to usenet (lost in time),
| offering 'render time' on my 286 for POV-Ray. They were such
| amazing times, yet compared to today seem so innocent.
|
| 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.
| alexisread wrote:
| A lot of people do similar with 3D printing now (esp. over
| COVID to print PPE), so there is a glimmer of this time :) Time
| to offer a real-world POV-Ray printing service? ;)
| vertnerd wrote:
| I really liked the scripting language for defining 3D scenes; I
| bet today you could have an interactive UI that shows the scene
| in real-time as you modify the script.
|
| The last scene I rendered, about 14 years ago, was a picture of
| the NIST national standard for pi:
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiggerntatie/pivis/master/...
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| Can you explain what that pi thing is for?
| jasomill wrote:
| I think it's a joke. The arbitrarily accurate power series
| approximation of pi (4 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + [?]) predates NIST
| (and the US).
| vertnerd wrote:
| It is a joke or a riddle, depending on your point of view. I
| used to be a high school math/science teacher, so this fits
| in at the intersection of those. If we have national
| standards for physical things like length, or mass, why not a
| national standard for a mathematical constant? It's just a
| ring with a scale on it that measures the circumference.
| Every now and then, a technician checks the value and records
| what they see in the log.
|
| Even my fellow teachers struggled to grasp the humor of the
| thing. I suppose I'm a little strange.
| maweki wrote:
| 10 years ago I implemented a brainfuck interpreter that had as
| output an animated povray scene description with a visualisation
| of the brainfuck abstract machine.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PIZTFrkl0w
| Keyframe wrote:
| bro...
| tverrbjelke wrote:
| Neat video. With some subtext to explain what the different
| "subthings" are for in brainfuck to stage and then do become
| "multiply" would make it even more "bro!"ish :-)
|
| I also spotted your openxcom play from 6 years ago and must
| confess that I am playing it these days!
| Keyframe wrote:
| Memories! POV vs Vivid flame wars. I think it were amongst first
| adventures in gfx on PC I had, outside of SGI and Amiga.
| m-i-l wrote:
| In 1991 or 1992 I used POV-Ray on my Atari ST to create some
| title screens for some home videos. Completely gratuitous marble
| text infront of a glass ball on top of water type of stuff, which
| took all night to render, but it was fun, and crucially free. For
| years I'd looked enviously at Cyber Studio for the Atari ST, with
| its StereoTek liquid crystal shutter 3D glasses add-on, but it
| was just too expensive for me at the time.
|
| 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.
| contingencies wrote:
| If you once enjoyed POV, check out OpenSCAD. It's quite similar
| in terms of CSG concepts and primitive animation capability, but
| more useful for getting actual mechanical design work done.
| https://openscad.org/
| nanoxide wrote:
| My first ever contact with programming back in 8th grade some 20
| years ago. My then-teacher's website about PoV-Ray is still
| online, in all its late 90s goodness (in German):
| http://asti.vistecprivat.de/index.html
| animal531 wrote:
| Probably 25 or so years ago I created my first render ever, in
| POV-Ray of a LEGO character's head using a hypercube.
|
| 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.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Bricklink Studio 2.0 lets you build and render Lego models
| using POV-Ray [1]. Looks as amazing as it sounds
|
| [1] https://studiohelp.bricklink.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/650602210...
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Used to use this and moray to make "cool" 3d graphics for clients
| around the early 2000's, such fun
|
| edit: moray is available on the wayback machine
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220331032107/http://www.stmuc....
| dayjah wrote:
| Able to share any of the "cool"? I feel like a hit of nostalgia
| rn.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| long gone unfortunately, though not that fancy, just made
| some text in moray and applied some materials, in a semi
| transparent box or sphere, render. The reaction was always
| wow, I always chuckled at the time.
| doubloon wrote:
| This is what I thought the internet wiuld become, back in the
| 1990s, just tons of projects like Povray. Not addeictive dark
| pattern trillionaires, see the recent Eli Gray article posted on
| HN how big tech enables link fraud for example. This was before
| FAANG existed as it does now. Apple was a struggling PC maker and
| Microsoft was the evil empire being challenged by a Finnish
| college student. Sun and SGI and DEC were big tech and they made
| you know... actual tech. It was this crazy dream that it would
| last like that forever, that the internet would just be one huge
| BBS of Povray style people, makers and users, who were interested
| in art and science above all else. Nobody was thinking you could
| contract third parties of poor people to screen out death videos
| on your BBS so they would have PTSD but you could make billions.
| Nobody was thinking to clickfarm children.
| katzenversteher wrote:
| Very well said. I miss the early days of the internet. In
| addition: Event though the net was not very safe at the time
| (no/poor encryption, no much monitoring by officials etc.) it
| kind of felt differently. Many users where at least aware of
| the dangers of speaking with strangers and downloading things
| but today it's somehow of more deceiving. It looks nice and
| shiny on the outside but full of traps. Maybe because the 90s
| web was less "shiny" on the outside, it was less deceiving?
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| As I have aged (almost 50 now) I have realised that greed will
| turn any good thing dark without vigilance, and then who
| watches the watchers. Eternal spring perpetually. A culture
| which prioritises individual profits over the commons will
| destroy anything not regulated.
|
| 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.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Or we could move away from pricing everything and the
| neoliberal obsession to turn everything into a market, and
| restructure our economy to provide everyone with their basic
| material needs, regardless of how much income they have.
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| even if we restructure everything to meet human basic
| needs, pricing will still be part of the equation. finite
| resources means value has to be attached to materials.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Value and price are not the same thing. Money is a form
| of access control which limits the availability of scarce
| resources to those people and organisations which have
| enough funds. It also collapses the value of all things
| to a single dimension. There are other ways to decide how
| much of something is produced and how it is distributed,
| for example participatory economics.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Money isn't just a form of rationing, it creates the
| scarcity it claims to solve.
|
| 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.
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| pricing is the exercise of determining value, even in a
| non monetary economy (think barter or contribution) you
| still need to price the value of materials and time.
| obviously money creates secondary effects which are not
| related to value due to arbitrages and other effects, but
| I do not believe you can have finite resources without
| determining value, which is what I meant by pricing.
| papa0101 wrote:
| So, a socialist society then?
| notact wrote:
| Make it opt-in, please.
| miki123211 wrote:
| We still haven't found a better resource allocation model
| than pricing.
|
| 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.
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| A key problem with unfettered capitalism is the tragedy
| of the commons. If left alone rogue/selfish actors will
| destroy that which belongs to all of us and is required
| to live (see nature). How do you propose to solve this
| without "benign" interference?
| wcerfgba wrote:
| > We still haven't found a better resource allocation
| model than pricing.
|
| There are many different models. Look at Elinor Ostrom's
| work, or projects using participatory budgeting.
| evilotto wrote:
| See also: enshittification
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Would you really go back to the internet as it was in the 90s?
| The current one may have problems (to say the least) but it
| also has miracles.
|
| 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.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Yes! Mostly for usenet but also for efnet and dalnet.
| lizknope wrote:
| Usenet in the early 1990's is still superior to modern
| forums. Threads could go on for years, the newsreader
| programs automatically marked posts as read and would only
| show you new posts in the thread. Compared to today it is
| hard to find what is new and then discussions die after a
| day on places like Hacker News and Reddit after it is no
| longer a top post on the page or subreddit.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > Would you really go back to the internet as it was in the
| 90s?
|
| It's like looking at a sweet kid who grew up to be a huge
| asshole and saying "would you really go back to that kid? He
| couldn't even drive a car!"
|
| I don't want to be frozen in the embryonic phase. I want the
| bright future that was promised and then snatched away.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Also the high-quality amateur scientist webpages. e.g.
| measurements on radiation heat loss to the sky when camping.
|
| OTOH... we now have sci-hub.se with high-quality professional
| scientist papers.
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| Me too...
|
| 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?
| DragonMaus wrote:
| I spent so many hours with POV-Ray when I was younger, rendering
| LEGO models I had made with MLCAD.
|
| Some of those renders even found their way into a project I did
| in school for CAD class.
| josefdlange wrote:
| Nostalgia unlocked...
| steve1977 wrote:
| To add some anecdote, I remember doing a short animation with a
| Star Wars A-Wing Fighter (the model for which I downloaded, not
| made myself). I added light sources in the engines for that
| "glow" effect.
|
| 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...)
| amenghra wrote:
| I love the hall of fame (https://hof.povray.org/), with
| https://hof.povray.org/Riemann_Sphere-Isosurface.html being my
| favorite. If someone made a simple povray => stl converter, I
| would get that one 3d printed.
| no_news_is wrote:
| https://grabcad.com/library/m-c-escher-sphere-spirals-1
| david_p wrote:
| I was 12 in 1996, in southern France, and my art teacher held a
| lunch-time club to teach us 3D modelling.
|
| 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 :)
| mscharrer wrote:
| Some POV-Ray art I created years ago:
| https://mscharrer.net/povray/scenes/ Source code is always
| included.
| dicroce wrote:
| Damn, I remember finding POVray on BBS's in the pre internet
| days. So cool that they have kept it going all this time.
| KqAmJQ7 wrote:
| This is very old but imo very interesting index of pov-ray stuff
| by various artists.
|
| https://www.f-lohmueller.de/links/index_re.htm
| geon wrote:
| Povray and the Internet Raytracing Competition was my entire
| world in the late 90s.
|
| https://www.irtc.org/stills/
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Same here! And yet the only time I placed it was for an image
| I'd created in Strata Studio-Pro.
| indyjo wrote:
| While POV-Ray was a cool project, let's not forget how far we
| have come with Blender and what a great success for the Free
| Software movement it represents.
| dagw wrote:
| What I'm kind of missing with Blender and the likes is the
| procedural 'magic' and surprise of POV-Ray. How just typing a
| few lines of 'code' into a text file could produce wondrous and
| mind blowing images, and then just changing a couple of numbers
| would give you an entirely different and unexpected result.
| Blender makes it infinitely easier to get exactly the result
| you want, but sometimes that not what you actually want.
| eggy wrote:
| I was one of the original donors in June 2202, iirc, for Ton to
| buy Blender and start the Blender Foundation. I used birthday
| money and sent I think, $50, that's why I remember it to this
| day. I still use Blender, but I was using it back then to
| generate 3D reliefs to carve on my self-built 4x8 foot CNC
| router table. I wrote a script based on a shape-from-shading
| algorithm originally developed by NASA to get more out of all
| of the single-lens B&W satellite photos they had. My company
| was The Wooden Image. To the other poster: you could do
| procedural stuff in Blender early on using Python scripting,
| although I was using POV-Ray very early on.
| anthk wrote:
| POV-Ray was free too since a few versions.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Mark Shuttleworth used it to render _Reach for the stars_ on the
| ISS in 2002.
|
| 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.
| lizknope wrote:
| My roommate in 1992 would run this on his 386DX with the 387 math
| coprocessor. It would take literally days to run to create a
| small 640x480 image.
|
| 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.
| koolala wrote:
| POV: PLY Author
| Something1234 wrote:
| I love POV-Ray. I learned about it in college when I was trying
| to find things to do on my gaming desktop that weren't gaming.
| It's so much fun to mess with and make different things with.
| There's some super impressive examples and stitching the images
| together is a lot like magic.
|
| 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
| tantalor wrote:
| > things to do on my gaming desktop that weren't gaming
|
| This is such a funny statement. What a strange perspective.
| fidotron wrote:
| Povray clearly holds a special place for many of us. For me it
| was the first use (via slow dial up) to access HENSA (higher ed
| national software archive) in the uk for public domain software,
| and this by itself was mind blowing, in between dealing with my
| mother keeping picking the other phone up and dropping the
| connection.
|
| 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.
| hooby wrote:
| I remember playing around with that like... 20 to 25-ish years
| ago.
|
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| >Do look like that
|
| Eeeeeeh... some advanced scenes with crazy complex lightning
| are still unmatched even from Unreal 5.
| codazoda wrote:
| I cut my teeth on POV-Ray. It hasn't been updated in some time
| but being able to code scenes has a lot of advantages.
|
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| There are tools like Fluent that help a lot :
| https://blendermarket.com/products/fluent
|
| The programmer is really cool and responsive on his Discord
| jgarzik wrote:
| DKBTrace and POV-Ray were my introduction to CGI.
|
| Open source meant it was possible for an Average Person with No
| Budget to do CGI animations and stills.
| ecliptik wrote:
| POV-Ray was my first introduction to HPC clusters. In the early
| aughts a few of us in college participated in a summer program at
| Wright Patterson Air-force Base to build a MPIPOV [1] cluster out
| of 10 old Sun SPARCStation 20s with "Happy Meal" NICs.
|
| 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
| pragma_x wrote:
| 32+ years and still kicking. Simplicity at it's best: all you
| need is a text editor and lots of CPU time.
| benterix wrote:
| Ah sweet 1990s... I remember tinkering with POV-ray and then
| discovering Blue Moon Rendering Tools - it felt like magic!
| benwerd wrote:
| Honestly delighted that this still exists. Like others, I used to
| leave my computer running overnight to render. Dating myself, but
| it was a big deal in the BBS scene in the UK in the early
| nineties - so many files and techniques being swapped.
| cadr wrote:
| I remember including something I rendered in POV-Ray on one of my
| college applications in the mid-90s.
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| Right? seeing the name brought back a rush of memories. I had
| no idea it was still around.
| usefulcat wrote:
| I remember being in college in the 90s when the school got a
| bunch of new HP workstations for the lab.
|
| perl + povray + rsh = distributed rendering!
| jwells89 wrote:
| I think I remember playing with POV-Ray (along with Yafaray) as
| alternative renderers for Blender back in the early 2000s, not
| long after Blender had been ported to OS X. At that point I had
| been making simple scenes in Blender for a while but had grown
| tired of the limitations of its internal renderer, most notably
| its inability to render caustics and bounced light, and so was
| trying my luck with other renderers.
|
| 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.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| There was a POV ray render of a McIntosh tube amp that I used to
| show people and nobody knew it was computer generated.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| https://hof.povray.org/images/mcintoshhdri3.jpg
| jandrese wrote:
| Wow, POV-Ray, what a blast from the past. I thought it might be
| fun to see how fast a scene renders today vs. back in the 90s
| with my Pentium-75, but apparently they've decided to integrate
| Boost so it takes forever to compile.
|
| 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.
| jpitz wrote:
| I spent a lot of time with POV-Ray. Back in ~1992 I had the IBM
| C++ Compiler for OS/2 and spent a day or so tweaking the source
| to get it to compile. Fun times.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| How does POVRay compare to Cycles?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Povray is 30 year old tech, Cycles runs on a GPU, its way more
| advanced.
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| I'm rendering Quake Done Quick (a Quake 1 demo) using POV-Ray.
| It's not fast. :-)
|
| https://blog.habets.se/2015/03/Raytracing-Quake-demos.html and
| qpov.retrofitta.se
|
| Here's an earlier video from before I added level texture mapping
| support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85pVYyK2uA
| RobRivera wrote:
| PovRay, now thats a name I have not heard in quite some time
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| ChatGPT is absurdly bad at POVRay.
| r24y wrote:
| This is an amazing project and I'm glad it exists. My college
| capstone project was building a 3d scanner, and we were able to
| use POV-Ray to create a repeatable test environment for our
| algorithms. Wish I had an excuse to play around with it nowadays.
| fgdelcueto wrote:
| As many here, I spent too much time with POVRay in my youth.
| About 8 years ago I decided to try an idea that I had in my mind
| and decided to install it and relearn it. I wanted to try this
| fractal idea made of toruses.
|
| It's a 9000px image, so I uploaded it here
| https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/beecf8383ac249978d943b8...
| where you can zoom in to see the detail.
|
| I remember being excited every month to see what people would do
| in the raytracing competition. Good times :D
| http://www.povray.org/competition/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-11 23:01 UTC)