johnnyace

Computer Graphics

What is Raytracing?

Raytracing means mathematically modeling a perfect pinhole camera to create nearly photo-realistic images of algebraic shapes. This technique, while visually stunning, can be time consuming.

The process involves calculating the ray of light for each pixel in the output image, then tracing its trigonometrical path through the scene geometry to determine its final color to the viewer.

These images were generated with POV-Ray, an excellent freeware raytracer with an active community. The software, along with a wealth of online resources, is available from www.povray.org

My first attempts at computer programming began back in the late 1970's when state-of-the-art display hardware was nothing more than monochrome text CRTs, and yet some of my seminal BASIC subroutines were simple animation loops squeezing whatever graphics I could from the machine.

It wasn't until I discovered POV-Ray circa 1990 that I began to rekindle my interest in computer-generated imagery. The ability to take pictures of a virtual reality defined only by geometric primitives was both challenging and satisfying, and I spent many hours exploring the possibilities.

Some of these images and animations look simplistic to me now, especially considering the exponentially faster hardware and elegant software applications available today, but I enjoyed the time and effort spent coding and creating them.

toyboat

This was my first (and last) submission to the IRTC. The theme that month was Toys, and this image looked so embarrassingly novice compared to the other entries that I never had the courage to participate again.

urbdes nova

Urban Designs, my make-believe business name, was the basis for my first few forays into branding and advertising. I toyed predictably with star fields and shiny chrome text, and this lo-res snip is all I kept.

pascal's logic

Back in college I briefly dated an adorable lesbian grad student who kept a loaded gun under her mattress and raised heated debate among her painting professors. The controversy was her medium; she took Polaroids of select television images, enlarged and photocopied them repeatedly until they pixelated into abstract color, then strategically covered an entire room with them—walls, floor, and ceiling.

Nobody could agree if it was Art or not, at least not the kind for which they award university degrees, but I found it entertaining. She struck me as endearingly misunderstood and I fell in love with her for a few weeks. Why she made an exception for me I'll never know. "What am I doing," she pondered aloud one morning, "lying here in bed with a bald-headed C-3P0 man?" I smiled and gnawed on her tattoos.

I hard copied this, had it matted and framed, then gave it to her as a portrait (the image on the televisions is a snapshot of her in front of an under-construction exhibit). I felt awfully vulnerable presenting it, but I finally believed that she liked it when I visited her new apartment a few months after we split and found it hanging. Oh yeah, and she really liked lava, which explains the bit about the floor.

stereo trangle spin

My very first attempt at stereoscopic animation using plain camera rotation. While not completely accurate, this technique did result in parallel-eyed stereopsis.

rgb satellights

A simple study in additive mixing. I was trying to create an animation that would generate all available colors, but this didn't even come close. Pretty, though.

jazz and stuff

Constructing complex objects using only POV-Ray's simple scene description language required a compass and calculator, so this qualified as my thesis in solid geometry. This was a potential IRTC entry for Music that I didn't feel was worth submitting.

urbdes tube

I conceived this as a brand image for a kitchen design consultant or historic-building renovator. I intentionally kept it simple so that it would work well in monochrome and at small sizes, but I still have the urge to add more to it.

modern woman on the edge

I especially liked the beveled Venus symbol I calculated for pascal's logic, so I made a magic wooden box in which to keep it, then left it precariously close to the table edge. This was essentially a texture and focal blur study.

sincos

I kept this rather basic image because its code, overlaid in the upper left, is so remarkably terse yet incredibly variable. That surprisingly small snippet actually generates a simple animation in which the spheres ride around the circular cosine wave.

earth night

Based on NASA satellite data from this amazing image, a spinning globe shows the Earth as it appears from space at night, clearly delineating the most urbanized places on the planet just 125 years after the invention of the electric light.

jalogo bluesky

An early experiment in extreme multi-axis movements using sine calculations to smoothly begin and end each leg of the careening camera path.