> The Legend Returns! Thank you for your contribution to what has become
> an excellent program and a lot of fun.

I'm flattered, but I hardly consider myself a legend.  I'm delighted, though,
that the program I wrote so many years ago has become such a success.  I, of
course, can't take credit for most of it.  It was the hard work of the POV-Ray
team that really built POV-Ray into what it is today.  I suspect that there is
hardly any of the original code in the current system.  That's the way these
projects work.

One thing I've always found is that the user community never ceased to amaze
me with their work.  When I wrote sample scenes in DKBTrace and POV-Ray, they
would normally be your classic textured spheres on checkerboard floors kind of
pictures.  I liked adding skys (because the texturing did them so well), but I
seldom worked hard to create a "really cool" image.  The only one I did that
was involved was the rendering of a Nortel switch with a computer, TV, and
telephone surrounding them.  I don't have the original sources, but I could
probably scan the image and post it so you can see it.

What I was saying was that the user community and the scenes they created were
always amazing to me.  For many scenes, I would have sworn that POV-Ray
couldn't have created it, but it did.  There was some talk earlier about Mike
Miller.  I found his scenes particularly incredible.  I also really like
"First Strike ar Pearl" and often use it as a sample image if I'm doing any
kind of image processing stuff.

These days, I'm working as a Smalltalk consultant.  (Did you know that
DKBTrace and POV-Ray had some Smalltalk concepts built into them?) I'm also
working hard on a commercial program which is a fun physics simulation package
for kids.  You can see a preview of the screen on http://www.simberon.com.  I
hope to have a public beta soon and a release in a few months.  I don't have
much time these days for raytracing, but I was talking about it to some people
I work with and showed them the povray.org site which led me here, so I
thought I'd say hi.

Anyway, I have to run for now.  Have fun (that was always the point anyway).

David Buck
dav### [at] simberoncom

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