Lewies Blog

When I was back in college at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, I took a few computer courses. One of my favorite was 3D modeling and animation. I liked it so much that I started working on my own little projects at my apartment. One of my favorite was a modem that I modeled after one of my own.

I used 3D studio release 4 (Also known as 3DS and 3DSr4). Back then, the program ran in DOS, came on a few floppy disks, and costed a few hundred bucks with a student discount. Today, its called 3D Studio Max, runs on windows, comes on a CD ROM, and costs thousands.

I’ve been looking around the internet a lot to solve my financial problem with the software and found The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (a.k.a. POV). This utility is light weight, powerful, and best of all … free.

Everything is done in script. There are no visual modeler front ends to this program that allow you to work with wire frames and such. I almost wish that I still had my 3DSr4 disks around. I have stumbled around enough to be able to setup a light, a camera, and a cube. I also found a nice online POV-Ray Tutorial too.

There are plenty of modeler front-ends to this freeware, but I’m having trouble using them before I export to a POV file.

I guess you may be asking yourself why I am going through this trouble. Simple. I want to make a web-based RPG game. I’ve had the desire to do this for many years, and I keep coming back to the idea time and time again and start working on little things. The problem is that nothing ever comes of it except a bit more experience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.