Ray-Tracing Animation
See the animation: tree-2.mpg (4.4MB)This was literally my first program in Java after the obligatory HelloWorld program. I made this in the summer 2001.
My Java program produced a scene description file for each frame of the animation. Each scene description file was rendered to an image using POV-Ray. The individual images were encoded into an MPEG stream by using free MPEG encoding software.
When the program was run, it created all the scene description files in the same directory. For the animation there was 360 frames, so 360 scene description files. They got quite large towards the end, due to the large number of individual objects. The description files were about 88 MB of text files in total. Each file got rendered to a 720x528 image file. Each file was about 1MB. The image file format was PPM. It is a rather uncommon format, but it seemed to be the only common format for the ray-tracing software and the MPEG encoder software. (The MPEG encoder dated back to about 1994 or 1995. I was hoping to find plenty of programs to choose from, but it seemed that there weren't that many programs you could use to encode a bunch of image files to an animation. I'm sure there are some huge commercial packages, but I couldn't get my hands on any of those.) The animation is an MPEG-1 stream with 720x528 resolution and 2.5Mbit/s bitrate. I still remember that the interface for the MPEG encoder was really interesting, trying to tweak with the animation parameters in text files... And this was all back in 2001.