POV-ray fun
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While deleting useless stuff from my data drive (I often have 50 numbered files of the same project), I have just found some POV-ray experiments I did back in 2000-2001. I used no modeler at all, I just typed in commands and loops and so on. The weird shapes you see here are fourth-dimensional fractals. I even did some animations that show the 4D object entering and then exiting our 3D space (Actually, you only see one 3D slice at a time, not the whole thing, as that's impossible), but I can't find those now.
Command line POV-ray was lots of fun back then but rendering was slow in a Pentium III, and without a way to connect it with ArchiCAD, then my favorite modeler, POV remained only a pastime. I've heard that POV-ray will soon be multi-threaded, so it will be worth a second look for some fun rendering weird stuff.
Someone asked recently about procedurals... This is a perfect example of a procedural wood on a 3D slice of a "quaternion" type 4D fractal. In other words, I just played around with the numbers until something cool appeared.
A similar object, but with an aluminium material.
Yet another fractal.
For this one, I only defined one sphere and repeated it using an "if" loop. I can't remember any more details.
Yet more loops used.
Again, I only defined one sphere and generated the colors according to position.
POV-ray was the first raytracer I experimented with, and I learned a lot of 3D terminology with it. I'm really thankful to the developers of this free, open-source application.
And before someone points this out, yes, pasting my name in a huge font in these images was a gross act of blatant self-promotion back then.
EDIT: I have now deleted my name from each image and re-uploaded them. -
Those are neat!
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The colour cube one reminds me of a DC jim made, does pretty much the same thing and looks similarly cool.
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