pov25

When I was dabbling with POV-Ray many moons ago, I drew the planets of our solar system to scale with it. You can see it here: https://github.com/susam/pov25#planets A friend once asked if I couldn't show the planets in orbit rather than lying flat on a plane. I could, of course, but this is ray tracing. What do planets actually look like to human eyes from Earth? Just tiny dots. If I were to show them in their proper orbits at scale using perspective projection, I'd only be able to render one planet large enough to be visually interesting. The rest would appear as small dots. I didn't want to use an orthographic projection, as it wouldn't reflect how we actually see the universe. Those were, of course, limitations of a still image. An interactive page like the one in the original post does a fantastic job of conveying the vast scale of o

Typically, when we photograph small objects at very close range, only a narrow depth of field is in focus. The rest of the image appears blurred. The further other parts of the scene are from the focal plane, the more they blur. This shallow focus helps us to understand scale and depth. However, in these pictures, the artist has cleverly avoided the blurring effect by combining multiple pictures taken at different focal distances into a single image. The resulting pictures look crisp and clear throughout, and as a result, lacks the usual depth cues we are accustomed to in macro photography. That's why these pictures resemble photographs of large halls! A similar effect can be observed in ray tracing as well, where we are free to construct entirely imaginary scenes. While defining a scene that we want to be perceived as small, we nee

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

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!