Comments on: 512 bytes of text to create a movie

512 bytes of text to create a movie

elgilito — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:29:27 -0800

POV-Ray Short Code Contest #5 - The animation round! This time the competitors were allowed 512 bytes of POV-Ray code to create a (short...) animation. The rules of rounds 2 and 3 (previously on Mefi) allowed 256 bytes but to create stills.

And the winner is: #local C=clock*pi;#macro B(N,F)sphere{0F/7 1scale 1-pow(I.5)translate-I*F*x rotate y*N*90rotate-N*x*pow(5I)*10*sin(I*2-C*8+i)scale.2+x*.8translate-x}#end#local i=C;#while(i<2>translate*2rotate x*37pigment{slope y}}#local i=i+pi/8;#end light_source{<0>1spotlight}media{intervals 6scattering{2rgb<>/99}}

By: Dr. Curare

Dr. Curare — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 02:25:10 -0800

This is great. I started playing with POV-Ray in high school, when it took 14 hours to render a 120 x 120 pixel still of a chromed sphere. POV-Ray was what finally showed me how awesome computer programming can be. Awesome with capital awe. I would stay late in school to get some rendering done on the server and to use the full color terminals reserved for EE majors. I would walk around late at night, red eyed, doing compulsive computer graphics aerobics and mumbling coordinates to myself. My mom went crazy trying to find the drugs in my room. Of my two friends that played with POV-Ray, one is a PhD in topology working at Google, the other one is coding hardcore graphics at Bioware. My humbler achievement is that I won a scanner in college, when scanners cost more than a good bike, with a biologically correct animation of swimming flagellated cells. BUT I was the first one to have a girlfriend.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:20:53 -0800

Sweet. POV-Ray got my college account suspended for *ahem* appropriating a closed for the night lab full of Sun computers to do distributed ray-tracing. grrrr. Now my desktop is faster.

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:03:30 -0800

Here's to remembering the old days of having a 386 and desperately dreaming to get that 387 (that's the floating point coprocessor for you youngins) in order to render chrome spheres on chess boards in less than 36 hours.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:15:51 -0800

It's a shame the Internet Raytracing Competition seems to be on permanent hiatus, but it's good to see stuff like this is going on. Nice find.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 05:16:47 -0800

college account suspended for *ahem* appropriating a closed for the night lab full of Sun computers to do distributed ray-tracing. grrrr. Now my desktop is faster. Heh. With me it was distributed.net. 40 minutes a block. I remember playing with POV-Ray on a P75... wrote a C program that generated sequential POV-Ray scripts and handed them off to the raytracer. I then compiled them by hand into an animated GIF. Hell of a lot of work to get a ball to bounce.

By: elgilito

elgilito — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 05:55:28 -0800

Jimbob: the IRTC has been unofficially replaced by the TC-RTC (This Is Not a CHeckered Plane Ray-Tracing Challenge). For more POV-Ray nostalgia, David K. Buck (father of DKB Trace) and Chris Cason (POV-Ray's current lead developer) were discussing the 20 year history of POV-Ray on TWiT.tv last week (1 hour podcast).

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:46:25 -0800

I still have two POV-Ray pieces that I was lucky enough to print on a really nice dye-sublimation photo printer. (They still look awesome to me. My visual art talents are pretty negligible, but I did manage some cool stuff with POV and the printing just makes it look better than it is.) One of them has a model of a little porcelain collie figure (that was handed down to me and sits in the window by my desk), and the modeling was all done with CSG. I don't have the code any more, and it certainly wasn't under 256 bytes, but I was prouder of that than many, many other accomplishments in life that I theoretically should care about.

By: DU

DU — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 08:57:56 -0800

UP HILL BOTH WAYS These look incredible and I even installed povray just to try them myself, but the site is so slow I can't get them. :(

By: pointilist

pointilist — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:41:02 -0800

They load slow for me.

By: The Monkey

The Monkey — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 02:15:49 -0800

Brilliant stuff. Seeing this sort of thing (and more particularly some of the stuff done with Processing) makes me want to work at being a better programmer.

By: Hubajube

Hubajube — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:08:54 -0800

+1 for the ray pun.