Justin's Ray Tracing Gallery

Ray Tracing is method of creating images on a computer from a mathematical description of a scene. The computer traces the path of each light-ray as it travels through the scene. Complex optical effects are simulated with great realism: mirrors, glass, water, fog. Examples of other people's work, and what can be achieved with ray-tracing may be viewed at the site of the Internet Ray-tracing competition.

This gallery shows some of my work. Images should display in any graphical browser. The animations are provided in several formats, so there should be at least one that works on your system: they've been tested on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Details of how the images are created may be found here.
Please email for further information if you're interested.

Titan Trader(larger JPEG picture 105Kb).

"Titan Trader" heavy goods space craft seen loading goods one clear summer evening at a spaceport on Earth, as a sister ship flies overhead.

Deltic Engine and similar animations (Separate page).

For a number of years, I have wanted to understand the workings of the "Deltic" diesel engine. This page describes what that engine is, and how it was constructed in POV-Ray. (Spring 2002)

Floating Ball(larger JPEG picture 88Kb).

Returning to the basics of ray-tracing, I pondered a variation on the classic ray-traced image of a reflective ball hovering over a blue-and-red chequered plane. The image was also an excuse to play with water (December 2001).

GenScout fast lander (Separate page).

A rapid courier-type space craft of the "GenScout" variety is seen here in a maintenance hangar.

Town buildings (larger JPEG picture 74Kb).

The inspiration for these buildings come from a variety of sources, most notably from time playing with my daughter's toys. A bit of imagination, some maths to make the repetitive parts seem exciting, and some experiments in reflective surfaces led to this. (July 2000).

Click to view Roller-Coaster animation 1173Kb

Roller-Coaster Animation (MPEG 1173Kb or AVI 839Kb animations).

Using spline code written by Chris Colefax, the roller coaster and motion are defined entirely in the POV-Ray language. I added the car and some heavy maths to make the car point into the curves. (October 1998).

Gas-works (larger JPEG picture 69Kb).

Inspired from a photo in a newspaper when some Gas-works structures in London were made Listed Buildings, I created this image in December 1996. It uses simple additive CSG, but the number of parts in the scene was more than the memory manager on my old Windows 3.1 machine could cope with. I added the rusty tanks and re-traced it using PovRay 3 running on Win95. (August 1997).

Minesweeper (larger JPEG picture 50Kb).

While playing a game of Minesweeper on my PC I had an idea for another little scene. The grass effect is created by altering the way the light reflects off the surface. PovRay 2.2 (May 1996).

The Ocean (larger JPEG picture 47Kb).

One of the first scenes I created in PovRay v2.2. This was adapted from the "sunset" tutorial example. This is still one of my favourites because the idea of a planet setting into the ocean is so simple, yet so thought-provoking. (April 1996).