I did these raytraces in college, using POV-Ray on a 100Mhz Pentium. Click on any image to see a larger version.
As I recall, this room is the first large scene I ever did. The things
on the table are a checkerboard and a vase. The beaver cartoon in the
frame was done by a friend of
mine.
The brick wall looks a little funny, but otherwise I think this bowling
alley scene is OK.
The strange spheres on the floor are supposed to be glass marbles, but I
never got them to look right. I think the razor blades look pretty good
though. I always wanted to get rid of the marbles and render a pile of
razor blades alone, but never did.
This could look better with a different floor and background.
I think I found this parametric transcendental surface near the back
of the CRC Handbook of Mathematical Curves and Surfaces; it
might have been called a "Devil's Curve" or something like
that. POV-Ray 3.5 (released in June 2002) introduced support for
direct rendering of parametric surfaces, but this was not supported
when I did this rendering. Instead, I built a surface mesh, from a
simple uniform triangular mesh in parameter space. Of course, there
are
better ways to generate the mesh. At one point, I computed the
surface normal at each vertex, and rendered a nice smooth shape, but I
can't find that rendering anymore; maybe I never rendered it at
640x480 because it took too long? Unfortunately, I can't find the
POV-Ray source, or the C code I used to generate the POV-Ray source,
anymore.
lou at louthompson dot com