I've been playing with a technique called ray-tracing for creating computer-generated pictures. The nice thing about this technique is that it really frees your imagination--if you're a photographer, you know how limiting the physical properties of light and material can be. With ray-tracing, anything is possible!
In the pictures at the top of this page, and on my Home Page, you've already seen some of the ideas I've had. I've always wanted to sit "on top of the world!" Below are even more variations--using the same photograph of myself--that I created on my home PC using ray-tracing techniques (note: you really need to have a good VGA color monitor with at least 256 displayable colors to see the following pictures properly):
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Have you ever wondered how you would appear to someone who looked at your face through a magnifying glass (well, a flat marble-shaped piece of glass anyways)? I did, and here's the answer! |
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... or, how about staring into a mirror that's been folded into the shape of a ball? You can do it with ray-tracing! (is my nose really that big??) |
I used a freeware package called POVRAY (which you can get at ftp://ftp.povray.org) to create the neat variations on my photograph that appear in these WEB pages.
Of course, what I've done in a few hours at home is nothing compared to what trained photograhers and graphic artists can do when they put their minds to it. I've selected some pretty amazing pictures that I found on CompuServe's GRAPHDEV forum. The "thumbnails" below are miniature renditions--I would offer the full-sized (800x600) versions here if my ISP allowed me to use more space for my WEBpages. All of these pictures were created using ray-tracing techniques (NOTE: the full-sized pictures are from 200K-300K each!).
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Incredible scene of clock on shelf that they say was created only using ray-tracing techniques! |
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Scene of elegant piano studio--complete with Dali painting. |
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Scene of stereo system in someone's living room--abstract painting of unknown origin. |
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This scene must have been created by some ecologist--as a personal statement. It really is amazing. |
It's pretty amazing that you can do now on these little home computers what only a few years ago took the CPU power of a Cray supercomputer!
