POVRay Projects

For right now, this is a very rough page that I will use to post renders and sources from my current and past projects. Hopefully I can clean it up a bit in the near future, but I don't feel like taking the time right now. I'd rather write more code!

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. about anything on this page, let me know!

NOTE: You can click the thumbnail images to see a larger version.

Peek-A-Blocks

This is my first POVRay project. I started this in March of 2004, and have been adding to it off and on since then. I still don't feel like it's done. I'd like to do more with it, but for now it looks pretty good. I had originally hoped to animate the blocks, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get to that point. At some point, I will probably make at least some of the source code for this available.

March 2004

April 2004

August 2004

September 2004

October 2004

November 2004

December 2004

Project start: 03/2004
Project end: ???

DVD Intro

I wanted to try and make a pretty impressive looking intro clip for the DVDs that I make, both for home videos, and also for anime fansubs. I didn't want to spend too much time on it, though. I somehow came up with the idea of a field of boxes, all with random heights, and each box colored with a single pixel from a larger image. When viewed up close, it would just look like a bunch of random, colored boxes, but from a distance, the image would be visible. I later came up with the idea of a fly-over, and the Beatles music really just seemed to fit. Overall, I am very pleased with what came out of just several hours of work.

Source files:

	scene.pov - The POVRay scene description. Not very pretty to look at. No comments, and it still has some commented-out debugging code in it, but it's short and pretty straght-forward.
	animate.ini - Animation settings.
	Hentschels_small.bmp - The image that has been "mapped" onto the boxes.

There is a small version of the animation available for download. It is in MS MPEG4 format.

This is an image from a prototype that I tested with.

And here are images from the final animation.

Project start: 09/2004
Project end: 09/2004

Ropes

I have been trying off and on for a while now to create some convincing rope barriers. I have succeeded in making a straight barrier with evenly spaced supports that looks pretty good. It doesn't hang exactly right. The shape of the rope is based on a modified sine wave, so it tends to look a bit flat at the nadir. I think that it will look acceptable, though, when placed in a scene at a bit of a distance, and from a different angle.

My next step is to make it so that I can place the supports anywhere that I want, and the rope will just run from one support to another. As I said, right now the supports must be in a straight line and must also be evenly spaced. After that, I will attempt to put pretty tassels at the ends of the rope, and then I will eventually work on texturing the rope, and creating new supports (the ones I have now are just placeholders).

Project start: 11/2004
Project end: ???

Castle in the Wood

For this one, I decided that I wanted to play with creating some macros to control the placement of objects, but I didn't want to spend much time designing the objects, themselves. Timmy's wooden blocks fit the bill nicely. Then I got to thinking, what if I had a very large number of wooden blocks, what could I build with it? I decided that a castle would be fun. So I set for myself the goal to build a very large castle out of wooden blocks in POVRay. When (and if) I eventually finish this project, I would like the output to give an immediate impression of something that would be practically impossible to build in real life because of the huge number of blocks involved.

Project start: 10/2004
Project end: ???

Balloons

In December, I made a DVD of pictures Marlene took of Timmy and his friends from play group. I wanted to have a cute animation on the menu of the DVD that featured all the kids in the group. I'm not sure how I came up with the idea, but I ended up making an animation of colorful balloons with the kids' faces mapped on them. I only spent an afternoon on this one, but it is one of my favorite projects. It's very simple, but looks quite effective when you see it on the TV screen. Certainly worth the handful of hours I spent on it. Most importantly, Marlene was very happy.

NOTE: I have removed the faces of Timmy's friends from the pictures and animation since I wasn't sure if they would want their children's pictures on the internet. Only Timmy's face appears now.

Source files:

Balloons.pov - Contains the description of the balloons and the path they travel.

animate.ini - The INI file containing render parameters.

There is a DivX compressed, very low-quality movie available for download (694 KB).

Project start: 12/2004
Project end: 12/2004

MIDI_POV

The goal of this project is to synchronize POVRay events to note events in a MIDI file. There are still some bugs in the way these scripts work, but I am finished development of them for now. They work well enough for my purposes, and I want to move on to something else.

The MIDI_POV project consists of two files:

	midi_pov.pl - This file takes a MIDI file as input and generates a POVRay include file as output. Include the output from this file in an animation project to synchronize events in that animation with events in the MIDI file.
	midi_pov.inc - This POVRay include file contains helper functions to facilitate working with the output of the midi_pov.pl file.

NOTE: In order to use the midi_pov.pl script, you will need to install the MIDI-Perl package, written by Sean M. Burke and freely available from CPAN.

These scripts and macros were used to create the menus for the Piano DVD set (no longer available due to licensing issues). Here is an example of how I used the above files in that DVD project:

	piano_small.avi - A very low quality sample of the video I created for the Piano DVD menu. It is in DivX format.
	chop64v2.mid - The MIDI file containing the music (note events) used in this animation.
	Piano.pov - This is the main POVRay file used for the animation rendering.
	animate.ini - The INI file containing render parameters. Note that the number of frames is consistent with the running time of the MIDI file (give or take a couple seconds of padding) rendered at 29.97 FPS.

Project start: 12/2004
Project end: 01/2005