EMAIL: michael@kdu.edu.my
NAME: Michael Ian Hartley
TOPIC: EVolution
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Evolution of a Ray-Tracer
COUNTRY: Malaysia
WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/ofolives
RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray
TOOLS USED: Pov-Ray editor, brain, pen, paper for the modeling. CMPEG to convert tga frames into an MPEG file. A program I wrote myself to hack into the TGA files and change the resolution from 320x240 to 320x200, when my animation came to 13Mb.
CREATION TIME: about 20 days, including rendering.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV, 2GHz
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Read the description first, then run the animation several times,
focusing on different parts of the scene.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

My very first ray-tracer was a program I wrote myself in Pascal. It whacked out a scene (hard-coded)
of some parabolic mirrors, a checkered floor, a plane mirror at an odd angle, and a black sky. Absolutely no shading or lighting at all, just full ambience. The image was displayed at 640x480 on
an 8 color display with no dithering. It took about 3 hours on an 8086 NEC APC3.

My second ray-tracer was a modification of the first. It showed a sphere, illuminated with a single light source. I used the same hardware, and attempted dithering to simulated graduated shadows.

My third ray-tracer was Pov-Ray. I think it was version 1 point something at the time.

This animation shows the evolution of a ray-tracer, applied to a simple set of shapes.

The first scene shows the shapes at full ambience.
The second scene adds a light source and shadows, refraction, specular highlights...
The thirds scene transforms the simple shapes into more complicated ones...
The fourth scene adds animation, reflecting Pov-Ray v2's in-built animation support...
The fifth scene adds complex textures. It also adds some normals to the textures, but they don't seem to make a huge difference here...
The sixth scene adds radiosity and photons. The viewer may miss this - unless one pays careful attention to the shadows of the spheres, or the general hue of the scene as the radiosity from the blue sky becomes evident. Look carefully also at the shady side of the yellow torus...
The seventh and final scene adds fog and a rainbow...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

I planned the scenes and the transformations, including how long each one would be. Then I modelled the final scene. Once I was satisfied with a given scene's model, I animated it, then modeled the transition from the previous scene, and the previous scene itself.

The most difficult transition was from simple shapes to complex ones. How do cones become a heightfield in a natural way? And how does a single orange cylinder become two tori of different colours? In the end, I used more complicated shapes in this transition than anywhere else in the animation. The cylinder becomes a superellipsoi for 0.75 seconds, then an isosurface for 2.25 seconds until it becomes the two tori. The colour is a function pigment, supposed to trasform from orange everywhere, to red + yellow in a smooth way (except for the turbulence I added to make it interesting)

Another transition that stumped me for a short while was: How does one fade photons in and out? The solution is remarkably simple in the end. For that transition, there are two light sources at the same location - one with photons and one without. I would have liked to also fade the photons ior from 1 to 1.5, but it doesn't seem possible in PovRay 3.5 to have different ior for the photons rays and for the image rays.