Today, I managed to contact someone I hadn't talked to in a long time - Aaron Collins. As many of you are aware, I wrote a raytracer called DKBTrace back in the late 1980's. I wrote it in C on the Amiga (using a few ideas from Smalltalk), ported it to Unix and eventually released it as freeware. Aaron Collins ported it to the IBM-PC and sent the changes back to me. He'd also implemented Phong specular highlights. Over the next year or two, Aaron and I worked together to enhance DKBTrace 2.0 to DKBTrace 2.12 which was the final release.
Before version 2.12 was released, there was quite a discussion going on in the Compuserve graphics forum. DKBTrace had really caught on but they were frustrated that Aaron and I weren't adding features fast enough to DKBTrace. They were talking about writing their own raytracer from scratch so they could add the features they wanted.
I offered a different option. If they changed the name, promised to keep it freeware, and promised to keep it portable, I would release the source code for DKBTrace to use as the base of the new raytracer. Everyone agreed and POVRay was born. I worked with the POVRay team for a few more years to help with the development, then I moved on to other projects.
The POVRay team has done some absolutely incredible things with the program since then. The quality and realism of the modern images is stunning. POVRay was even used in space to render an image for a poster. Even though I'm not currently involved with the project, I find it amazing to see what's become of it.
The POVRay artists have also provided stunning results. In the early days, I was amazed by what Mike Miller was able to produce. These days, I'm amazed by
And many, many more.
The popularity of POVRay is also amazing. Whenever I give courses or talks and I mention that I was involved with POVRay, there's inevitably someone there who knows about it or has used it. I'm proud to be able to say I helped create something that has provided fun and enjoyment to thousands of people for over 15 years and counting.
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