Hi Steve,
Thanks for the post of the really nice image and I appreciate the amount of both human
and CPU time that goes into rendering these things, then tweaking and re-rendering
again and again.
I started using Rayshade along with the Utah Raster Toolkit in the early 90's on
UNIX workstations. A favourite reference text was Foley & van Dam's wonderful
book, "Computer Graphics". The collection of color plates in the middle of the
book alone probably inspired large numbers of people to either enter into or
dabble in the field.
At some point, I migrated from Rayshade to POV. Without the benefit of a modeler,
plentiful lines of source text would go into creating objects. For example, hours would
go into instantiating the keys on a model of a keyboard that would then be just
one object in a collection of objects in a scene.
These days I have no free time to ray trace for purely artistic or recreational reasons.
However, we continue to use POV for some work, but for fast visualization
we use Luxion's
KeyShot (which up until a week ago was Bunkspeed's Hypershot).
Keyshot's extremely fast rendering times, combined with its ability to
assign materials, change the environment and camera angles on the fly whilst it
is continually rendering is a real time saver. Having said that, computers will never
be fast enough.
