POV-Ray Short Code Animation Winners

Paul Bourke writes "Every year the POVRay rendering community run a short code competition. The challenge is create an image using a limited number of bytes, normally just 256. This year the competition required the artist to create an animation rather than just an image. The winning entries are now online where you can see what can be created for a meager 512 bytes."

Comments

I wonder

[g0bshiTe]

Seeing these submissions for their artistic value, and knowing they were produced entirely from code, I wonder if there is any correlation between artistry and programming.
I know that programming is very creative in the first place, but some of these submissions go beyond, especially when you take into account they are less than a k.

Re:I wonder

[dousette]

So how on earth does one come up with the trig functions necessary to do these transformations by hand without a modeller? Look at the complexity of the winner.

I am not artistic by any stretch of the imagination, but I do enjoy math and programming and downloaded POV-Ray and the related documentation hoping to learn more about art through programming. So far, I made a sphere on a checkered floor, and POV-Ray handled all of the trig for me there.

Any tutorials out there on mathematic transformations and how they apply to a 3d rendering?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting? Perhaps, insightful, not at all.

Art is programming, isn't it? A canvas(). paints[]. brush.setColor(...) - brush.stroke(canvas). A painting is a process, derived from inputs, filters, intelligence and our own inputs and memory.

What I cannot understand is how little of 'creativity' humanity understands. What inpresses me about these images is how close to the entropy of the image the code reflects.

You can make a very detailed, colorful image in a few bytes, but it will be a fractal, mandlebrot or some itterative process. Looking at the work created in context free , you also get a feeling that you are describing the imagery.

You can say:

Apple.

Or you can describe it in a thousand words, or show a picture. These are encodings of the final image, a way of compressing the output into a common language that can represent it again.

Certainly, if POV has an apple, or rosy-apple command, you could make a very lifelike apple in one command, but the language would be universal (and you would have to then vary it to be more specific).

The fact that visual imagery is being transmitted in this way reflects what I wrote about in my thesis (waaay back) - how we can describe a more common language to computers, to allow for higher compression.

I studied fractal compression, and various compression techniques (wavelet, various block based transforms, all frequency based) and tried to look at image analysis, an interesting but oft discarded element of image processing. Rather than say 'sky... trees... house' the processing could at least abstract gradients and noise patterns and apply them via a BSP style tree structure to the image, a little like feature labelling algorithms.

The idea being you can succinctly describe enough properties of the image, that the 'error' you can to then encode has sufficiently small entropy so that it was a big win in compression.

So, I love these images for really riding the entropy line, and creating works in an almost 1:1 language (it *is* a 1:1 language, but I mean, with flexibility and dexterity)

Re:I wonder

[Grard Menfin]

It's been traditional for POV-Ray users to create images entirely by code. That was the case for instance of this image that won the POVCOMP competition in 2004: most objects, including very complex ones, were made using isosurfaces, that are basically function-based objects. Scenes like this one and this one were also written in POV-Ray code, and the source is available.

Re:I wonder

[Nazlfrag]

I'd like to throw in www.256b.com to the mix.

Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that!

[Trogre]

Look I'm as keen on the oldskool demoscene as the next guy. I've seen pretty much every noteworthy 256b, 512b, 4k etc demo there is. But you know what? In this age of multi-tasking pre-emptive multitasking operating systems, I miss that scene. I really do. That drive to create, given a constrained framework, something unexpected and impressive. And these POV demos bring back that same feeling (probably nostalgia) for me. More than that though, they seem like a logical evolutionary step in that scene. So the framework used to be an i386 or an Amiga. Today it's POV-Ray. So what if this platform is a fat-ass raytracer? Are Amiga demos unimpressive because they're linking to big gfx/sound libraries implemented in hardware?

Let the demos roll, I say.