

Show HN: A collection of algorithmic art generated with POV-Ray - mscharrer
https://mscharrer.net/povray/

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spankalee
Reminds me of some of the work of Ryan Geiss (the author of several WinAmp
visualizers like Geiss and Milkdrop):
[http://www.geisswerks.com/](http://www.geisswerks.com/)

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robin_reala
I’d forgotten all about Ryan; was obsessed by Milkdrop in 2001. Thanks for the
trip down memory lane.

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Sharlin
Hee, nostalgic! I used to play around with POV-Ray a lot in the 00s; at that
time there were quite a few extremely skilled artist-coders in the community
[1]. Shame that the software has since fallen into relative obscurity - I
wasn't even aware the dwindling developer team actually managed to get a final
3.7 release out in 2013 after years of betas and release candidates.

[1] See eg. Gilles Tran at
[http://www.oyonale.com/3D.php?lang=en](http://www.oyonale.com/3D.php?lang=en)

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Rapzid
To bad this is defunct:
[http://www.irtc.org/stills/](http://www.irtc.org/stills/)

POV ray and IRTC got me into 3D. Once upon a time I thought I was going to
have a career in it. Became absolutely obsessed; Modo beta tester, SIGGRAPH
trip in '07\. Now I'm a systems engineer, go figure. Ah the memories though :)

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IanCal
Wow, that brings back memories. I came 79th once in one of those! I've just
gone and found it and I was 14 at the time.

3D art was going to be my thing too, then I got into programming. It was
actually through programming python scripts in Blender that I became
interested in programming generally. I'm digging back through old forum posts
to see if anything I've made is still about but so many image hosting sites
have disappeared. I'm not sure what it looked like but one comment about a
head I'd modelled was "personal opinion, but I think he'd look better with
eyelids".

Thanks for jogging those memories! :)

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usrusr
Pretty much the same here. I even got two top-20 results, but I was a few
years older at the time. POV-Ray scene description language was how I made the
jump from Pascal and visual basic "begin end" syntax styles to the world of
curlies. And after having spent so much time with the imitation, learning the
C preprocessor was so much easier.

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IanCal
Nice work!

I think visual outputs are an excellent way of seeing what's going on in code,
and semantic errors are often very enjoyable.

The other major thing that I learned through was about the open source
community in general. The amount of intense work that people put out for free
is incredible. So many people producing things and sharing and generally
helping out. That then encouraged me to help work on code but also things like
help critique work, answer questions, etc.

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sjdegraeve
... and here I thought the landscape art bot I started yesterday was good.
I've got a long way to go.
[https://twitter.com/LandscapeArtBot](https://twitter.com/LandscapeArtBot)

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theseatoms
It is good! What do you have in mind as the next step?

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sjdegraeve
The goal is to get the landscapes to resemble sci-fi/fantasy environment
concept art. Rough plans include adding clouds, vegetation, buildings, human
figures, and foreground elements.

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valera_rozuvan
Check out work done by Hatsumi Kanayama -
[http://homepage1.nifty.com/hakka/edo/3dedo/index1.html](http://homepage1.nifty.com/hakka/edo/3dedo/index1.html)
. Her style might be what you are looking for.

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mscharrer
The POV-Ray source files are included. Example:
[https://mscharrer.net/povray/liquid_fire/2/liquid_fire_v2.po...](https://mscharrer.net/povray/liquid_fire/2/liquid_fire_v2.pov)

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mscharrer
I put the source files on Github for easier browsing:
[https://github.com/mscharrer/povray_scenes/tree/master/abstr...](https://github.com/mscharrer/povray_scenes/tree/master/abstract_scenes)

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glaberficken
Anyone know other nice visualizations of prime numbers? I was particularly
struck by this one:
[https://mscharrer.net/povray/primes/2/](https://mscharrer.net/povray/primes/2/)

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jrosenbluth
[http://mathlesstraveled.com/2012/11/05/more-factorization-
di...](http://mathlesstraveled.com/2012/11/05/more-factorization-diagrams/)

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glaberficken
great! thanks

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Dragon256
About 20 years ago, I did something similar with PolyRay, it even allowed you
to do animations.

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valera_rozuvan
PovRay allows you to do animation too.

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valera_rozuvan
Anyone know of new, 201*, awesome examples of PovRay usage out on the
Internet?

