Rendering

I have been facinated by computer graphics for a long time. When I saw TRON for the first time, I was inspired. I wanted to be able to produce graphics like that with my home computer. Of couse, the Apple ][+ was simply not capable of such a thing.

Sometime around 1993 I found a book entitled "Tricks of the Graphics Gurus", published by Sams Publishing. On the floppy disc that came with the book was one of the greatest gems I had ever come across: a copy of Polyray, a very capable ray-tracing program. I spent hours hand-typing geometric descriptions of scenes I had envisioned and letting the software turn them into full color, photo-realistic images. Okay, so they weren't really photo-realistic, but with care it was possible to create very convincing scenes.

I eventually discovered POV-Ray, a freeware ray tracer available at www.povray.org.

POV-Ray was a great improvement over Polyray, but it still lacked a tool for creating objects and scenes. You have to manually type the scene description or buy 3D modeling software that costs thousands of dollars. Or, you could write your own 3D modeling program. I chose the last of those three options.

POV-Mod

POV-Mod is a 3D modeling tool that I created for use with POV-Ray. It's not fully functional, but it does a fairly decent job. One of these days, I'll get around to fixing the bugs and finishing up the feature set.

Resources

Here are some links to resources related to rendering.

mayang.com chock full o' textures