The “Break it Down” Blog

This is pretty phenomenal. For the people reading this that used to follow the demo scene from the 90s (Future Crew anyone?), I guess there is a contest out there called the “POVRay Short Code Contest“.

In the past contestants would submit pictures for the contest and see who could create the most technically compelling image using only 256 characters in a POV-Ray code file. This year Contest #5 was held but modified slightly; they upped the amount to 512 characters and they were accepting animated submissions, no longer images.

NOTE: QuickTime required to watch the movies below, otherwise I guess they will load up as broken links.

The winners were announced, with 1st Place given to Jeff Reifel for his piece “Rays”:

but I found 3rd Place “Fountain” by Peterson Trethewey much more impressive:

and then the 1st Place in Honorable Mention “Whirlpool” by Alex Kluchikov I thought looked awesome:

I am amazed, graphically, at what can be produced using such small bits of code. Bravo to these guys for thinking outside the box and producing these.