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POV-Ray Short Code Animation Winners

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the 512-bytes-is-plenty dept.

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."

26 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror by augustz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you are going to link to what looks like a single machine that is supposed to serve up loads of videos, a mirror would be nice in the story submission :)

    1. Re:Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror by xaxa · · Score: 5, Informative

      Robot filter
      Sorry, some robots are filtered from this site.
      You are using Wget/1.10.2
      This filtering is not intended to restrict your enjoyment of this site. There is a very large amount of data contained
      within and robots who attempt to copy the whole site adversely affect our bandwidth and wallet.

      Anyway, here's the winning result:
      #local C=clock*pi;#macro B(N,F)sphere{0F/7 1scale 1-pow(I.5)translate-I*F*x rotate y*N*90rotate-N*x*pow(5I)*10*sin(I*2-C*8+i)scale.2+x*.8translate-x}#end#local i=C;#while(itranslate*2rotate x*37pigment{slope y}}#local i=i+pi/8;#end light_source{1spotlight}media{intervals 6scattering{2rgb/99}}
      (by Jeff Reifel)

    2. Re:Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror by xaxa · · Score: 5, Informative

      Forget my previous post, the NYUD.net mirror is working well.

    3. Re:Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Back in the days people looked at timestamps and moderated the first guy up, and the second guy "redundant". What happened to Slashdot? Gotta penalize those who repeat a comment, whether it's plagiarism or not bothering to read the thread.

    4. Re:Slashdot + Many Videos = Where is the mirror by MadnessASAP · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm going to forgo posting with mod points and actually post a meassge, the reason the first poster did not get modded up was because he posted AC and only posted the solution, whereas xaxa posted the solution, the author and the reason why mirroring the website wouldn't work.

      --
      I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
  2. I wonder by g0bshiTe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
    1. Re:I wonder by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://scene.org/

    2. Re:I wonder by dousette · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?

    3. Re:I wonder by Grard+Menfin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:I wonder by Nazlfrag · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

  3. bad summary? by friedman101 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seems to me like the challenge is to create a script for "POV-ray" that is less than 512 bytes to create a cool animation. Title lead me to believe that some of those animations were under 512 bytes which would have been totally amazing.

    1. Re:bad summary? by TheSunborn · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you think of powray as an animation player, and have a REALLY fast computer, then the animation is only 512 bytes :}

  4. I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...the second animation pretty much shows what happened to their server.

  5. 512B pov-ray? Screw that! by Xtense · · Score: 5, Insightful

    POV-Ray? Screw that, see what can be made in a 256B EXECUTABLE. Just to give some popular examples, tube/3SC, PHOBIA/ind. Yup, the demoscene was there a long time before, and still it churns out some beautiful code that boggles the mind. Nothing impressive to see here though, just a fat-ass raytracer with a small input file.

    --
    "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
    1. Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      512 bytes ought to be enough for everyone!

    2. Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that! by Xtense · · Score: 4, Informative

      True that, but every time i see some size-coding competitions, I can't help but feel like they are some form of geeks' penis-measurement competitions. Thus, to satisfy my inner asshole, i like to point them to those demoscene productions, which, to the best of my knowledge, are indeed one of the smallest coded animations in the world. And the 256B limit is just traditional, there are animated moire patterns in 15B down there and four-kilobyte demos utilizing OpenGL and DirectX. Some of the OpenGL ones are for linux, too, with source.

      Oh, and these renders might be prettier, but these are still just input files for a huge raytracer, so IMO, there's nothing really to cheer about. Make a 'tracer in 512 bytes, then I'll be impressed :) .

      And yes, this post is really inflammatory, get off my lawn, you insensitive clod, etc. etc.

      --
      "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
    3. Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that! by Cctoide · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, mine's smaller!

      --
      "Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
    4. Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that! by neumayr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Heh, yeah, let's keep the fire going:
      Utilizing OpenGL/DirectX you say? So, the code's 15 or whatever bytes long, but dynamically linked to a huge library. That's not so far removed from interfacing with a raytracer, at least it's a lot closer to it than the demos you originally posted.

      I personally never did anything for Povray - honestly I didn't know it could do animation before this story. But given the range of quality of the animations in this contest, getting anything done in a 512 bytes Povray files seems to be a noteworthy achievement.
      So, let them cheer :)

      --
      Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
    5. Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that! by Xtense · · Score: 5, Informative

      Oh no, the 15B moire pattern is pure assembler, no libs attached. I had a link somewhere, let me find it in a moment (crap internet connections suck!). You could say that it's cheating, using the MCGA 13h 320x200 256color mode (or for the pros out there - raping text mode's charset to produce something weird), but that's one step from declaring that the true form of demomaking is building your own hardware and coding effects for it with your own assembly. Which in itself would be immensely cool, but a bit overkill. As for the OpenGL/DirectX 4K stuff, it's just moving on with the times - every normally used computer out there has at least DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.1 with compatible hardware on it, so it would be a shame not to use natural-environment libraries.

      Couldn't find the 15B one, so here's a one-byte bigger thing: fr-016: bytes/Farbrausch.

      I remember doing school stuff in POV-Ray, simple things like cubes, spheres, intersecting cones and whatnot for my math geometry/stereometry classes. While not having heaps of experience like these guys, i think i can safely assume that, while requiring creativity and effort, these aren't truly that hard to make, since this is mostly 3d math, fractals and quadrics sprinkled a bit with randomness on the top. But i guess i just get my boner from creative software hacks (which, in turn, are too 3d/2d math, just hacked up beyond all recognition), not scripts. Oh well, different fetishes ;) .

      --
      "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
    6. Re:512B pov-ray? Screw that! by Trogre · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  6. Coral cache link by burris · · Score: 3, Informative

    just append ".nyud.net:8090" to the domain name

  7. Latest FLOSS weekly about POV Ray by Zarniwoot · · Score: 4, Informative

    Incidentally, the most recent FLOSS Weekly podcast (with Randal PERL Schwartz) is about POV-Ray. As usual interesting:
    http://www.twit.tv/floss24

    1. Re:Latest FLOSS weekly about POV Ray by pthisis · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Incidentally, the most recent FLOSS Weekly podcast (with Randal PERL Schwartz) is about POV-Ray. As usual interesting:
      http://www.twit.tv/floss24


      That's pretty odd considering that the POV-Ray license, while quite liberal, is not open-source. The podcast erroneously lists it as such, and the podcast doesn't correct that (at least in the first few minutes). The POV-Ray license in particular prohibits much commercial distribution (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 6) and allows a revocation list of people/distributions who are not allowed to distribute at all (in violation of OSD/DFSG term 5).

      I don't want to give the impression that the POV-Ray team is against open-source/free software. There is a lot of thought towards a GPL'd rewrite by the POV-Ray team, and the main reason it's not open-source is that the license predates any real definition of open-source or free software in the modern sense and there are too many contributors to relicense easily.

      I just want to point out that the POV-Ray license is not currently open-source, that's a known issue that the developers are trying to address, and it's odd for a podcast dedicated to FLOSS not to mention that up front (and indeed to erroneously list it as open-source on the intro page).
      --
      rage, rage against the dying of the light
  8. Videos of first 4 prizes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=cubancigar11

    (Posting anonymously)

  9. Re:Where's the code? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's right there - look for "Short version" just under the image. "Long version" is with comments and formatted to be readable.

  10. Need the ini.txt file, too by ODBOL · · Score: 2, Informative
    Well, I was troubled when I ran povray on the winning program, and got only a still picture. After some muddling around, I noticed that the contest rules specified an "ini.txt" file, to wit:

    Output_File_Type=N
    Width=400
    Height=300
    Quality=9
    Antialias=on
    Antialias_Threshold=0.01
    Initial_Frame = 0
    Final_Frame = 99
    Initial_Clock = 0
    Final_Clock = 1
    --
    Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/