Hee, nostalgic! I used to play around with POV-Ray a lot in the 00s; at that time there were quite a few extremely skilled artist-coders in the community [1]. Shame that the software has since fallen into relative obscurity - I wasn't even aware the dwindling developer team actually managed to get a final 3.7 release out in 2013 after years of betas and release candidates.
POV ray and IRTC got me into 3D. Once upon a time I thought I was going to have a career in it. Became absolutely obsessed; Modo beta tester, SIGGRAPH trip in '07. Now I'm a systems engineer, go figure. Ah the memories though :)
Wow, that brings back memories. I came 79th once in one of those! I've just gone and found it and I was 14 at the time.
3D art was going to be my thing too, then I got into programming. It was actually through programming python scripts in Blender that I became interested in programming generally. I'm digging back through old forum posts to see if anything I've made is still about but so many image hosting sites have disappeared. I'm not sure what it looked like but one comment about a head I'd modelled was "personal opinion, but I think he'd look better with eyelids".
Pretty much the same here. I even got two top-20 results, but I was a few years older at the time. POV-Ray scene description language was how I made the jump from Pascal and visual basic "begin end" syntax styles to the world of curlies. And after having spent so much time with the imitation, learning the C preprocessor was so much easier.
I think visual outputs are an excellent way of seeing what's going on in code, and semantic errors are often very enjoyable.
The other major thing that I learned through was about the open source community in general. The amount of intense work that people put out for free is incredible. So many people producing things and sharing and generally helping out. That then encouraged me to help work on code but also things like help critique work, answer questions, etc.
The goal is to get the landscapes to resemble sci-fi/fantasy environment concept art. Rough plans include adding clouds, vegetation, buildings, human figures, and foreground elements.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] thread[1] See eg. Gilles Tran at http://www.oyonale.com/3D.php?lang=en
POV ray and IRTC got me into 3D. Once upon a time I thought I was going to have a career in it. Became absolutely obsessed; Modo beta tester, SIGGRAPH trip in '07. Now I'm a systems engineer, go figure. Ah the memories though :)
3D art was going to be my thing too, then I got into programming. It was actually through programming python scripts in Blender that I became interested in programming generally. I'm digging back through old forum posts to see if anything I've made is still about but so many image hosting sites have disappeared. I'm not sure what it looked like but one comment about a head I'd modelled was "personal opinion, but I think he'd look better with eyelids".
Thanks for jogging those memories! :)
I think visual outputs are an excellent way of seeing what's going on in code, and semantic errors are often very enjoyable.
The other major thing that I learned through was about the open source community in general. The amount of intense work that people put out for free is incredible. So many people producing things and sharing and generally helping out. That then encouraged me to help work on code but also things like help critique work, answer questions, etc.