This is a quick little project I worked on a little during my senior year of high school. When I took Physics in my Junior year, I got interested in ray tracing. At the time, the only readily available ray tracing package was POV Ray. While it was (and still is) a high qualitiy free offering, it was exceedingly slow in those days.

I began to get frustrated in the speed with which it took to do even simple renderings on my modest computer. I was also taking a Java class at the time, so for a class project I decided to write a program that would let you do your scenery in wire-frame, then it would write the POV code for you that would generate and render the same scene. The image above shows the java program at work.

Shown above is the code that was generated from the image in the second panel java window. Below is the rendered frame, which corresponds to the wire frame object in the java window above.

While this project was simple and didn't get very far, I enjoyed working on it when I was learning the language. It was a fun application of my physics knowledge and my interest in ray tracing. I would consider continuing work on it now, but ray tracing has sped up enough that it is a rather moot point unless I plan to build a full CAD drawing package. :-)