Tom Austin wrote:
> David Buck wrote:
> 
>>
>> David (Kirk) Buck
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> All my life I've been facinated with 3D graphics and in 1994 my world 
> was opened...  I found DKBTrace and then POV-Ray 2.2 on BBSs and my 3D 
> world took off.
> 
> Thanks bunches!
> 
> 
> Tom

I first got interested in graphics around 1978 when I saw a 3D vector 
animation (no hidden line removal). When I took linear algebra in by 
last year of high school (1980-81), I was mostly interested in how to 
use matrices for 3D graphics.

Somewhere around 1981-82, I remember discussing a graphics technique 
with a friend of mine.  My idea was to shoot rays from a viewpoint out 
through a virtual image into a 3D world, find the closest point of 
intersection with objects in that world, then color the pixel with the 
appropriate color.  Sound familiar?  Unfortunately, I didn't have the 
hardware to do the calculations or the display.

It was only after I got an Amiga that I had the color capacity to do 
raytracing.  I had done some line graphics in 3D before, but when a 
friend brought over a C program that did raytracing, I was intrigued. 
It only rendered grayscale images and only supported spheres. I got it 
running on my Amiga and later adapted it to support color.

I then abandoned it and started writing my own from scratch.  The first 
version of DKBTrace I released only had quartics (no primitives for 
spheres, planes, cylinders, cones, etc), CSG, and procedural textures. 
The procedural textures were implemented based on a paper in the 1985 
SIGGRAPH conference called "Solid Texturing of Complex Surfaces".  I 
thought they looked cool.

DKBTrace and POVRay are excellent examples of programs that were grown, 
not built.  It started from a small core and grew from there.  We didn't 
do a design of the complete system and build it from that.  I'm 
convinced that the organic growth technique works best.

Anyway, I'm glad others have had fun with it.  I've always found 
computers and programming to be fun and like to let others to have fun 
with them as well.

David Buck

Post a reply to this message