Show HN: A collection of algorithmic art generated with POV-Ray | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A collection of algorithmic art generated with POV-Ray

mscharrer.net

90 pointsmscharrer25 comments

Reminds me of some of the work of Ryan Geiss (the author of several WinAmp visualizers like Geiss and Milkdrop): http://www.geisswerks.com/

Cool stuff.

I’d forgotten all about Ryan; was obsessed by Milkdrop in 2001. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Hee, nostalgic! I used to play around with POV-Ray a lot in the 00s; at that time there were quite a few extremely skilled artist-coders in the community [1]. Shame that the software has since fallen into relative obscurity - I wasn't even aware the dwindling developer team actually managed to get a final 3.7 release out in 2013 after years of betas and release candidates.

[1] See eg. Gilles Tran at http://www.oyonale.com/3D.php?lang=en

To bad this is defunct: http://www.irtc.org/stills/

POV ray and IRTC got me into 3D. Once upon a time I thought I was going to have a career in it. Became absolutely obsessed; Modo beta tester, SIGGRAPH trip in '07. Now I'm a systems engineer, go figure. Ah the memories though :)

Wow, that brings back memories. I came 79th once in one of those! I've just gone and found it and I was 14 at the time.

3D art was going to be my thing too, then I got into programming. It was actually through programming python scripts in Blender that I became interested in programming generally. I'm digging back through old forum posts to see if anything I've made is still about but so many image hosting sites have disappeared. I'm not sure what it looked like but one comment about a head I'd modelled was "personal opinion, but I think he'd look better with eyelids".

Thanks for jogging those memories! :)

Pretty much the same here. I even got two top-20 results, but I was a few years older at the time. POV-Ray scene description language was how I made the jump from Pascal and visual basic "begin end" syntax styles to the world of curlies. And after having spent so much time with the imitation, learning the C preprocessor was so much easier.

Nice work!

I think visual outputs are an excellent way of seeing what's going on in code, and semantic errors are often very enjoyable.

The other major thing that I learned through was about the open source community in general. The amount of intense work that people put out for free is incredible. So many people producing things and sharing and generally helping out. That then encouraged me to help work on code but also things like help critique work, answer questions, etc.

I guess this would be the new version of that: https://home.otoy.com/render-the-metaverse-month-3-grand-pri... And this is the older-school-than-thou version, which is still going: http://www.ifcomp.org/

This successor is still going strong: http://www.tc-rtc.co.uk/

They're even working on POV-Ray 4 now. http://news.povray.org/povray.pov4.discussion.general/ They sure have my respect.

... and here I thought the landscape art bot I started yesterday was good. I've got a long way to go. https://twitter.com/LandscapeArtBot

I actually like many of them beacause of the colours and that cartoonish vibe.

It is good! What do you have in mind as the next step?

The goal is to get the landscapes to resemble sci-fi/fantasy environment concept art. Rough plans include adding clouds, vegetation, buildings, human figures, and foreground elements.

Check out work done by Hatsumi Kanayama - http://homepage1.nifty.com/hakka/edo/3dedo/index1.html . Her style might be what you are looking for.

I really love the stylized look of the bot's output. How does it work?

The POV-Ray source files are included. Example: https://mscharrer.net/povray/liquid_fire/2/liquid_fire_v2.po...

I put the source files on Github for easier browsing: https://github.com/mscharrer/povray_scenes/tree/master/abstr...

Anyone know other nice visualizations of prime numbers? I was particularly struck by this one: https://mscharrer.net/povray/primes/2/

http://mathlesstraveled.com/2012/11/05/more-factorization-di...

great! thanks

About 20 years ago, I did something similar with PolyRay, it even allowed you to do animations.

PovRay allows you to do animation too.

Anyone know of new, 201*, awesome examples of PovRay usage out on the Internet?

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