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Here are some nifty images done with a ray trace engine I wrote in C++ a long time ago. (1990) The second one was used as the background for a magazine advertisement.
These are done with the tracer program , in Java. I wrote it in 2002 and lately touched it up. I'm also working on it to make it duplicate the Photon Soup algorithm.
Photon Soup
This image was generated in 1991 by simulating the motion of 29.8 Billion photons in a room. The room is 2 meters cubed with a 30 cm aperture in one wall. The oposite and adjacent wall are mirrors, so this is a 'tunnel of mirrors'. The depth of field is very shallow. In the foreground in a prism, resting on the floor. A beam of light emerges from the left wall, goes through the prism and makes a spectrum on the right wall. About 1 in 177 photons made it through the aperture.
The image took 100 Sun SparcSataion1's 1 month to generate using background processing time. This represents 10 CPU years of processing time. If the lights are 25 watt bulbs this represents a few picoseconds of time. This was 'grid computing' way before it's time.
I have an old 8mm Sun (QUIK-8 ?) cassette tape with the original 24 bit images of all 5 of these images and source code. If anyone has a reader and would liek to extract the data please let me know.