created Sunday, 2006 September 17
updated Sunday, 2006 October 1
Copyright © 2006 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy, store, & view this document unmodified & in its entirety is granted.
These are the results of a personal programming project in which I write programs which create virtual worlds & produce movies of them. I use an open source ray-tracer, \& of course the movie CODEC is commercial, but I wrote the other software, most of it in Lisp.
Here are some stills & the movies I've produced with some implementation notes about them.
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This is the first movie I made to test my movie-making software system. I'm not sure the balls are a fractal. It looks fractal-ish to me, so for lack of a better term, I'm calling it "fractal balls". I found the scene description in a book about ray-tracing.
This "virtual world", if it qualifies as such, is static. The camera moves from a higher elevation to a lower elevation; there are no other changes to the world between frames.
By experimenting with different CODECs, I learned that Cinepak gives the best quality of the CODECs installed on my computer now. I've heard it is portable, so I'll probably continue to use Cinepak.
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All four objects are sitting on a marble table top, & the camera rotates around them. You can see the marbling well in the version compressed via Cinepak, but you can hardly see it at all in the version compressed with IV 4.1. Also, on my computer, the frame rate with IV 4.1 is low & irregular.
The pyramids are instances of the same object, but one is scaled to be larger. The pyramid which looks black isn't black. It's solid glass. You can see reflections on its surface some of the time, but I guess the one overhead light source & the few objects to reflect make it look black.
The sandy-coloured pyramid is supposed to be colored & clear, like coloured glass. I wasn't able to twiddle my ray tracer's parameters to make that happen the way I wanted.