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From: nick@hp-sdd.HP.COM (Nick Flor)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga news (genlock & lots more, *long* but juicy)
Message-ID: <627@hp-sdd.HP.COM>
Date: Thu, 11-Dec-86 11:43:43 EST
Article-I.D.: hp-sdd.627
Posted: Thu Dec 11 11:43:43 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 15-Dec-86 02:45:01 EST
References: <1272@zen.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: nick@hp-sdd.UUCP (Nick Flor)
Organization: Hewlett Packard, San Diego
Lines: 34

In article <1272@zen.BERKELEY.EDU> hatcher@ingres.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Doug Merritt) writes:
>
>They also showed a *** 3-D ray-traced smooth-motion animation *** showing
>a clown juggling 3 reflecting balls!!!!!! Extraordinary. The absolute best
>by 2 orders of magnitude that anyone has yet seen on an Amiga. This
>was done by one Eric Graham, and Commodore/Amiga apparently is *very*
>interested in his work. This animation is a loop of 24 frames running
>continuously, on a 512K machine with no disk accesses after the program
>starts up and no other upgrade hardware. The frames were precomputed
>but I don't know how he fit them all in 512K. There's that CCC
>compression technique...hmmm...This demo will be available as a FAUG
>public domain diskette next month.
>

But, did he cheat? Can you see the clown reflected in the balls?
Was the clown rendered also?  
A lot of people don't seem to understand ray-tracing.  
(This is why you are so amazed that he could do this without any disk accesses,
 and smoothly at that)
You can display just the rectangles that enclose the 3 spheres.   You needn't
display all n raster bit-planes.  
In my opinion, this is a simple demo (reflecting spheres are sooooo basic).

(Sorry to sound so sarcastic, but after implementing my ray-tracer,
 I found that ray-tracing wasn't as big a deal as people on the net
 were making it out to be.  Try implementing one.  Have fun
 with the rounding errors though...)

Nick
-- 
+ Disclaimer: The above opinions are my own, not necessarily my employers.
/ Nick V. Flor / ..hplabs!hp-sdd!nick / Hewlett Packard, San Diego Division
* "What's going down in this world, you got no idea.  Believe me."
-  The Comedian