povRay - blast from the past

While digging through a pile of old cds, I found a few my old old povRay renders.

I came across povRay v1.0 on a coverdisk for UK PC Format magazine in 1993.  (And subsequently, via local dialup BBS, its powerful sourcecode ancestor DKBTrace)

.. I still have the magazine right here in my book shelf.

These renders are from about the year 2000. (That doesn’t sound quite as futuristic as it used to, eh?)

I can’t guarentee that potatoshop wasn’t used to post-process these renders.

The goldfish image is a frame from a looping animation that I exported from XSI to povRay with a VBscript I wrote.  Maybe I should rehash the povRay exporter in python? For teh lulz?

The anisotropic-shaded Utah teapot was rendered with a crazy povRay patch called povMan that supported a very limited subset of Renderman SL.

Gilles Tran’s povRay renderings and story telling were a massive inspiration during my povRay years.  He also co-authored the very first image to be raytraced while orbiting the earth in the International Space Station!

Read about the first image to be raytraced in space here.