I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created 
based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years 
old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and 
POVRay is still going.

It's always fun watching what POV artists can do with the tool.  I still 
use myself it from time to time.  In fact, I recently used POVRay to 
render tiles in a game I'm developing for Android and iOS devices.

I was wondering if anyone wanted to render any 25 year celebration 
pictures.  I'd like to see what you can come up with.

Post them in povray.binaries.images. I'll monitor that newsgroup for a 
while as well as povray.general.

Happy Birthday, POVRay.

Thanks,
David K(irk) Buck

Post a reply to this message

David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
> I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created
> based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years
> old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and
> POVRay is still going.

Incredible! No. Not what you're thinking probably, incredible that you're 4
years younger than me! ha!

I was so grateful when on CompuServe I stumbled across your ray tracer way back
in 1991 or '93 (I forget now). The search was on for something more than
ordinary image creation and that was the first I learned of ray tracing. I never
wrote a program, having only Fortran and Basic (and its variants) know-how so I
decided to leave that to others like you.

I found the old Ray Tracing News is still online (with broken links of course)
and gives some insight to the timeline and what was out there. Before and after
this has more of DKBTrace if you navigate around using the contents link there,
then RTN "guide" link.

http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/rtn/rtnv4n3.html

Tells of "PV-Ray", misspelled or not, from 1991. Look for it before the bottom
of the web page.

Thanks many times over for your work getting POV-Ray started.

Bob

Post a reply to this message

Happy Birthday, POVRay!

Post a reply to this message

I can remember having the idea for raytracing as early as 1981 or so.  I 
came up with the idea independently - I wasn't aware of Turner Whitted's 
article on raytracing. The problem was that the computer I had at the 
time didn't have the graphics capability to display raytraced scenes. 
The idea didn't go beyond the idea phase but I do remember that it was a 
raytracing approach.

It was 1986 when I had an Amiga that a friend of mine brought over a 
Unix raytracer written in C.  It rendered only gray scale images and 
only spheres but I was blown away by the images.  I played with it for a 
while but decided I could do better writing my own from scratch.

I must say that the best part was when I implemented procedural 
textures.  Seeing marble, wood and water textures for the first time was 
pure joy.  I was always amazed by pictures in the SIGGRAPH proceedings 
and with DKBTrace I could create pictures just like that.  It was amazing.

I took a lot of inspiration from Ken Perlin's article "An Image Processor"

http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/Library/Papers/perlin:1985:IS/

I went through that paper several times over and implemented those 
techniques into DKBTrace.  I still find them amazing.

David



On 2016-11-04 12:23 AM, omniverse wrote:
>
> Incredible! No. Not what you're thinking probably, incredible that you're 4
> years younger than me! ha!
>
> I was so grateful when on CompuServe I stumbled across your ray tracer way back
> in 1991 or '93 (I forget now). The search was on for something more than
> ordinary image creation and that was the first I learned of ray tracing. I never
> wrote a program, having only Fortran and Basic (and its variants) know-how so I
> decided to leave that to others like you.
>
> I found the old Ray Tracing News is still online (with broken links of course)
> and gives some insight to the timeline and what was out there. Before and after
> this has more of DKBTrace if you navigate around using the contents link there,
> then RTN "guide" link.
>
> http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/rtn/rtnv4n3.html
>
> Tells of "PV-Ray", misspelled or not, from 1991. Look for it before the bottom
> of the web page.
>
> Thanks many times over for your work getting POV-Ray started.
>
> Bob
>
> David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
>> I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created
>> based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years
>> old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and
>> POVRay is still going.

Post a reply to this message

On 11/4/2016 3:09 AM, LanuHum wrote:
> Happy Birthday, POVRay!
>
>
>
>

I don't think I used POV-Ray before 3.6 whenever that was. The early 2000s?

Mike

Post a reply to this message

On Sun, 06 Nov 2016 06:56:08 -0500, Mike Horvath wrote:

> On 11/4/2016 3:09 AM, LanuHum wrote:
>> Happy Birthday, POVRay!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> I don't think I used POV-Ray before 3.6 whenever that was. The early
> 2000s?
> 
> Mike

I remember having a conversation with Chris Cox a few years back, and he 
pulled an entry from the libraries section of CompuServe with a 
description of one of my first rendered images - a cribbage board showing 
a hand with a perfect 29 score (the playing cards were scanned in using a 
scanner my employer's marketing department had - it was a pretty big deal 
to get them scanned in).

I kinda wish I still had the source files, but I'm pretty sure they're 
long since lost.

Jim



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

Post a reply to this message

I just want to say Thank You for writing DKBTrace, and Thank You to the entire
Pov team for keeping the dream alive.

With no jest, I would not be where I am in life right now without Pov-Ray; it
introduced me to programming and got me hooked, now about 22yrs later I have
worked for Fortune 100 and 500 companies and currently I am VP of Risk Tech and
Principal Software Engineer/Architect with a multinational bank.

I likely would have never developed an interest in any of this without the
influence of Pov-Ray and this community.

My sincere thanks for introducing me to the world of software and graphics.

Ian McDonald

David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
> I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created
> based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years
> old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and
> POVRay is still going.
>
> It's always fun watching what POV artists can do with the tool.  I still
> use myself it from time to time.  In fact, I recently used POVRay to
> render tiles in a game I'm developing for Android and iOS devices.
>
> I was wondering if anyone wanted to render any 25 year celebration
> pictures.  I'd like to see what you can come up with.
>
> Post them in povray.binaries.images. I'll monitor that newsgroup for a
> while as well as povray.general.
>
> Happy Birthday, POVRay.
>
> Thanks,
> David K(irk) Buck

Post a reply to this message

My goal with raytracing has always been to have fun and to encourage 
others to have fun with technology.  It's gratifying to hear that so 
many people have gotten so much out of it.  If I inspire anyone to learn 
about computers and graphics I'm delighted.

For myself, I'm President and CEO of a small company called Simberon. 
We do object-oriented consulting and training - primarily in the 
Smalltalk programming language (DKBTrace and POVRay were written in C 
but incorporate some object oriented concepts taken from my prior 
experience in Smalltalk).  I'm often asked to deliver courses on 
Smalltalk and I love teaching them.  One time when I was delivering a 
course, one of the students asked if Smalltalk could be used for 
computer graphics.  I asked what kind of graphics.  He said that he was 
doing raytracing.  I said that Smalltalk's floating point processing was 
normally a bit too slow for that and I asked what package he used for 
raytracing.  He said it was POVRay.  "Oh", I said coyly, "I wrote that". 
  I had my name on the whiteboard at the front and he looked at it and 
said "Are you the David Buck who wrote DKBTrace?" "Yes", I said.  "Wow", 
he said, "what a coincidence".  I just said "Not for me".

I then clarified that I wrote DKBTrace and helped with POVRay in the 
early days but many more people have made POVRay into the amazing 
package it is today.  I've had little involvement since the early 
1990's.  I still feel proud of what POVRay has become, though, and my 
part in making it.

Thanks for your story.  It warmed my heart.

David

On 2016-11-07 7:10 PM, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:
> I just want to say Thank You for writing DKBTrace, and Thank You to the entire
> Pov team for keeping the dream alive.
>
> With no jest, I would not be where I am in life right now without Pov-Ray; it
> introduced me to programming and got me hooked, now about 22yrs later I have
> worked for Fortune 100 and 500 companies and currently I am VP of Risk Tech and
> Principal Software Engineer/Architect with a multinational bank.
>
> I likely would have never developed an interest in any of this without the
> influence of Pov-Ray and this community.
>
> My sincere thanks for introducing me to the world of software and graphics.
>
> Ian McDonald
>
> David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
>> I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created
>> based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years
>> old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and
>> POVRay is still going.
>>
>> It's always fun watching what POV artists can do with the tool.  I still
>> use myself it from time to time.  In fact, I recently used POVRay to
>> render tiles in a game I'm developing for Android and iOS devices.
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone wanted to render any 25 year celebration
>> pictures.  I'd like to see what you can come up with.
>>
>> Post them in povray.binaries.images. I'll monitor that newsgroup for a
>> while as well as povray.general.
>>
>> Happy Birthday, POVRay.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David K(irk) Buck
>
>
>
>
>

Post a reply to this message

David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
> I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created
> based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years
> old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and
> POVRay is still going.
>
> It's always fun watching what POV artists can do with the tool.  I still
> use myself it from time to time.  In fact, I recently used POVRay to
> render tiles in a game I'm developing for Android and iOS devices.
>
> I was wondering if anyone wanted to render any 25 year celebration
> pictures.  I'd like to see what you can come up with.
>
> Post them in povray.binaries.images. I'll monitor that newsgroup for a
> while as well as povray.general.
>
> Happy Birthday, POVRay.
>
> Thanks,
> David K(irk) Buck

If we could have the "reach for the stars" POV-Ray scene by Gilles Tran & Jaime
Vives Piqueres we could make a modified version, and try to send it to Thomas
Pesquet while he's up there in the ISS for rendering?

Post a reply to this message

On 11/3/2016 7:26 PM, David Buck wrote:
> It's always fun watching what POV artists can do with the tool.  I still
> use myself it from time to time.  In fact, I recently used POVRay to
> render tiles in a game I'm developing for Android and iOS devices.

Actually, this seems to be what I most often use POV for these days... 
I'm not very good at hand-drawing, so when I need graphics for a project 
I'm working on I just whip up POV and code away...

Post a reply to this message