POVRay Short Code Contest, Round 3

An anonymous reader submits "The aim of the POVRay Short Code Contest SCC3 is to create an artistic work using POVRay (a free raytracing program) using only a limited number of bytes. The last round had an upper limit of 500 bytes and this round increased the challenge by reducing the maximum number of bytes to 256 (about 2 average length English sentences). This round saw some exceptional entries, an example of extreme image compression since these images can be created at any arbitrary resolution! The competition is now closed to entries and voting, which is open to the public, has started. The 51 entries can be viewed here. POVRay can be downloaded free from povray.org/."

Comments

Size coding

[termos]

Size coding can be a lot of fun, you should check by pouet (seem to be down right now) for some 256b, 128b and even 16b productions, 256b.com has some more.

Very impressive stuff. :)

Re:Where's the code?

[Sparr0]

RTFA. The site says the code will be released after the voting is completed.

My favourites

[Thornae]

Here's a few that impressed me:
"The Agate Face". An incredible piece. Could be a photo of the cliffs near where I grew up. I'm looking forward to seeing the code for this one.
(No title)
"City"
"Simple"
(No title)

Also, the judging method is interesting:

• Each voter will choose their six favourite images based upon artistic merit. A first choice will get 6 points, the second will get 5 points, and so on.
• The gold place winner will be determined by dividing the total number of points awarded by the byte count.
• The silver place winner will be the entry with the highest number of points.
• The bronze place will go to the entry with the highest number of points divided by the square of the bytes used, this rewards the lower byte counts while still requiring an interesting image.

Perhaps this entry is counting on getting a couple of votes and winning the bronze...

Re:My favourites

[cybermace5]

The Agate Face apparently uses the isosurface command that not many people get into. It's very powerful. I assume it's called Agate Face because they used the agate map as the function input to the isosurface, maybe with the turbulence turned up a bit.

POVRay license

[0x0d0a]

It's true that the POVRay license is rather unusual, and does prohibit commercial distribution. (According to their legal page, the POVRay community has been apparently trying to move away from this to something more common...I hope the BSD or GPL license...and this will apparently be done with the v4 rewrite).

The thing is, while Fedora can be now, I suppose, considered "commercial", Dag and Freshrpms are decidedly not commercial.

Good thought...I suppose that could be the problem.