David Buck wrote:
> 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.
> 

Around 1988 or 1989 - just before I entered high school - I found a book 
at the local library titled Microcomputer Graphics by Roy E. Myers - 
it's one f those things you will never forget.  I was always interested 
in computer graphics, but this did it to me.  It allowed me to design my 
own 3D objects with hidden line removal.  I forever wanted to tell the 
library that my dog ate the book and regret that I did not do that.  At 
the time I didn't understand the math behind the graphics, but who knows 
where I'd be today if I had the book as I grew up and referred to it as 
I learned the concepts in school.

But I still had the programs....  So in 9th grade I taught myself 
assembly and machine language on the Apple IIe so that I could do some 
mini animations.  The BASIC programs would computer all of the data and 
store the points in memory.  Then the assembly program could use the 
memory to quickly display the precomputed images for an animation.  I 
didn't go much beyond that, but it was a lot of fun.


> 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.
> 

	That sounds like that start of a ray tracer :-)
	It's amazing how far computing power has come in the past 10-20 years. 
  Things that were virtually impossible a decade ago are common place 
today - just because of the speed available.

> 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.
> 

	SIGGRAPH still produces some interesting topics.  One I recently ran 
across was dual photography.
	http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/

> 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.
> 

When you allow an outlet for others with talent to help improve 
something, you aren't just hearing their clamors for new features, you 
are getting the new features.

> 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.
> 


I can't agree more.



LAter...  Tom

Post a reply to this message