There's something about a ray-traced image that is so beautiful! Things can be shiny, in which case all the reflections are taken care of perfectly by the ray-trace algorithm. I put some time in yesterday to get code up and running that generates POV-Ray scripts based on the tensegrity object model, and here is the result:


Click here to see the full-scale image.

It kind of reminds me of some of the paintings of Salvadore Dali with the vast empty spaces and the precise shadows.

Soon this same piece of code will be employed to make movies of the growing tensegrities. I suspect that the vast majority of visitors to darwin@home are not the kind of people who would be interested in running a program to see stuff, so it always makes me happy to be able to produce accessible images and films of these things.