''DaBar's Studio''

The only thing `artistic' about this is the image at the rear... I did

this at the end of a Loooong day and sleepless night. It was kinda fun

to do and I DID learn a little more about the process of creating such

an image.

Ray tracing has been around since at least the early 80ties. I don't know the programs that can do this but I recognize a fellow that used to submit some stuff that was so realistic that you could not tell that it was ray tracing. These tracings need lots of computing power and depending on the complexity could take the whole night to render the image. I like what I see. Hope you don't have another sleepless night.

I have been using ray-tracing infrequently since about 1990. The software I used for this is around that vintage but still does OK, even on Vista. This scene rendered in about 3 minutes as a simple rendering w/o ray-tracing. The image in the background rendered, with multi-reflection raytracing, in about 35 minutes on my laptop.

If this were current software with sse2 and CUDA support it would render MUCH faster. My laptop has a dual-core cpu running at 2.13 Ghz and an Nvidia CUDA processor that runs at about 4 Ghz. Running BOINC it runs three tasks, in the background, simultaneously, and still lets me use the computer normally for most functions.

Before You Ask... It is an ACER Aspire 4935G.

I am now experimenting with ways to combine ray-tracing with my other tools to produce some innovative imagery. It keeps me active and exercises my mind. It also gets me out of the house and away from family distractions. I do much of my work while on the outdoor patio at a local coffee shop. They have a fairly fast, 1.5 Mbps+ Wi-Fi hot-spot and outlets to plug into on the patio.

Stay Tuned.... I MAY produce something Special from time-to-time.

Thanks for your continued interest and support!