Abstract Shapes

This is a ray-traced synthetic (computer-generated) image of a few abstract shapes with various textures. It represents my first foray into digital imaging. The subject isn’t that interesting, but it certainly is clean! The original, which is of photographic quality, measures 1600x1200 in 16,777,216 colors, and required over 660 billion computer operations to generate.

One of the advantages to computer-generated images is that they can be viewed from different angles; I have an example of the above shapes as seen from another angle, if you’d like to see how this looks (click on the image itself to alternate between the two views).

If you look closely, you’ll notice some interesting things about the photo that conflict with the real world as we know it, even though this looks just like a photograph. For example, look closely at the reflections of the light sources; notice that they are just hanging in midair, with no hint of any kind of lamp or projector assembly, and no visible means of support. They are just… there! Also, the objects appear to be on a table, but in fact they are on an infinite plane—a table that extends to infinity in every direction. I daresay that you won’t find too many free-floating lights or infinite planes in real life! That’s part of the fun of ray-tracing, though: you can create “photographs” of images that could not possibly exist in real life.

I used a 32-bit Pentium-enhanced implementation of POV-Ray,™ the legendary freeware ray-tracing software distributed by the Persistence of Vision™ Team (POV-Team), to generate this image. You can find this software in the POVRAY forum on CompuServe (the official support forum for the product) and on the POV team’s web site. It’s great stuff!