Скачать или смотреть Delusion - a 1999 ray-traced graphics demo

This is a video I created in the summer of 1998/1999 as a demo for Wellington company Weta Digital, in the hope of obtaining a job with them working on the Lord of the Rings movies. The final video doesn't, unfortunately, give a very good impression of the amount of work that had gone into the demo, nor of the quantity of programming behind the scenes.

The only modelling software I had at my disposal, Vivid 2.0, took text files describing light sources and simple objects such as spheres or triangles, and turned these into a ray-traced image. I used the programming language Pascal to output hundreds of such files, one per frame of the animation, and left the 100Mhz 486 PC computer to batch-process these frames. It took a month to render (I went on a family holiday for three of those weeks).

All objects were hand-crafted by a variety of means, for example:
The Rubic's Cube was programmed in Pascal by calculating the locations of part-spheres (corners) and polygons (faces), and programming the movement as the cube "solves itself".
Camera movements were programmed in Pascal by calculating camera accelerations, decelerations and movements along variations of sections of sine waves.
The Earth's clouds were drawn pixel-by-pixel in Paintshop Pro 3.11, morphed using DMorf 1.1.2, and then converted by another Pascal program to polygons calculated to sit above the Earth's surface. The planets were created similarly.

There are many failings to this video. The camera angle makes it hard to see the fish swimming backward and disappearing against the bowl that contains it. Because my computing power was limited, I chose the output the ray-traced images at 320x200 pixels (remember, even this took a whole month of processing). The only animation software that I could obtain, DTA 2.0.8, could only produce 256-colour AVI files. I outputted the video onto VHS tape, and unfortunately I've lost the original AVI so the version you see is captured from VHS.

Nonetheless, this was an amazing project for me that I poured my heart and soul into for several months. I hope you found this interesting viewing.