Just wanted to try making a recursive fractal macro. The house was going nowhere fast; maybe I’ll give it another try later, just make something simple as a scene prop.
This was a little more complicated than I thought it would be, and I ended up making it using two macros instead of one; one macro made the main body of the object, the other made all the holes. It ended up taking 1 day, 6 hours, 2 minutes and 46 seconds to render the whole thing.
Not much to look at, but I’m hoping to make this into something that can be used for a roof on a house. I want to be able to define the perimeter by a series of points and have it automatically make a roof shape based on that. I tried something similar for the house body itself; it worked for simple perimeters like this one above, but more complex ones gave unexpected results, so we’ll see if I can figure out how to make it work this time.
Just found a game, “Marble Marcher“, on itch.io that has real-time “ray-marching”, which it says is similar to raytracing. It needs a good GPU to run, as it uses fractals as a 3D landscape to roll a glass marble over towards a goal. It does look very nice, but as my computer is not super high end, and the game is not really highly optimized, it doesn’t run very smoothly on anything but the lowest resolution setting for me.
There’s also a community developed edition, which is supposedly better, but I couldn’t get it to run on my machine at all. Oh well. It was interesting to check out at least.
Ok, so it’s a very simple scene, but I was getting a bit worn with this, and I think the bottles are pretty alright for now. This is just something to close the project out with. Next time, I should add a little texture work to the wall and floor at least. Maybe the “grass” outside as well.
Looks like I haven’t posted in a little over a month. Wow, so easy to slack off.
I was trying to make a label for the bottle, but I’m getting a bit side tracked at the moment. Just want to make a “quick” picture, and trying to use a bit of randomness in the process. The positioning of the bottles was tweaked using randomness, and the texture for each tile was also rotated and translated randomly.
Now to see if I can make a decent picture out of it.
Just a link to a POV site I found this week.
No Lights, the site of Tim Nikias. I only took a brief look, it has a POV-Ray gallery, and what looks like some useful include files, such as a set of macros for liquid surface simulation.
Well, no update in a little over a month, but I have been working on a macro to convert a linear spline to control points for use in a bezier spline, which seems a bit easier to get what I want than a cubic or quadratic spline.
So here are a couple pictures to show where I’m at. The third one is more of an attempt to illustrate the macro I was putting together. Blue points are the input array, red points are the bezier spline control points.
Haven’t had a proper update to the site in a while. No excuses for it, except that I haven’t been making as much progress with the raytracing in a while. So I did a bit of poking around the POV-Ray website, and found a link to a website that might be useful.
The Persistence of Ignorance, the site of Jaime Vives Piqueres; it hasn’t been updated in about three years, but it has a bunch of resources, and pictures that might make it worth perusing.
I had made a wallpaper of this one, but decided that blue might go better with the background. It took 21 hrs 23 min and 52 sec to render. I think it does look better, though.
Well, I decided to add in a bunch of points to make the interior hollow, but for some reason it wasn’t working. I banged my head against it for pretty much the whole week, until I realized I was referencing a variable that I had not meant to use there. It was named similar to the one that I actually wanted to use… Whoops.
It still looks a little weird, though; the lip of the bottle has a funny groove in it, and the bottom corner looks thinner than a real bottle would be. I think I can fix them, though, but it’ll take a bit of work. Especially the corner thing.
So I took a little time to smooth out the spline, and learned something: check the output of the functions you use. I was getting an error that POV-Ray was trying to use an xyz vector as a uv vector, which it apparently does not like to do. I isolated two lines as the possible source of the problem, and noticed that they both referenced a variable I’d made using the vnormalize function, which outputs an xyz vector. So after I added a line to trim the vector down, it worked perfectly…
Well, it worked. It still took a bit of fiddling to get it just the way I wanted it.
Sometimes it is helpful to tweak the objects so that they are easier to see; the glass material was making it hard to see what was going on here. And the floor plane cut off the bottom of the bottle. Now it looks like I might have a bit more work to do to get it the way I want.
And on to another project I go. The logo is pretty much finalized, and I’ll probably make a wallpaper from it, but I wanted to take a little break and try something different.
This time, I’m starting off by making an include file, instead of making a scene and then trying to convert it to an include file later. Hopefully this will save trouble later on.
Well, finally got the thing done. It’s a bit of a kludge, code-wise, but it gets the job done. I might go in and redefine it all in terms of logo height and width, so it’s more useful later on. And I want to make a cool wallpaper or two with it as well.
