Home | What is Raytracing? | Raytracing Algorithm | Raytracing Reference | How to write a Raytracer | Links | Humour | About Me
(I came across this list while surfing the Net and couldn't resist putting it here. Not all of the items are equally good, but some are absolute gems :) A complete list can be found at rune|vision -- Raytracing Jokes)
...your friends are used to the fact that you will suddenly stop walking in order to look at objects and figure out how to do them as CSGs.
...the alarm clock goes off, and you try thinking: object { SnoozeButton translate y*-0.25 }, and then can't figure out why the alarm keeps ringing.
...you find yourself fascinated by things other people don't even notice.
...you see a physically attractive person, and your first thought is, "Nice blobs!"
...you own Toy Story, have watched it at least two dozen times, and know stupid trivia like the number of different tile textures they used on the floor of the foyer in Sid's house, but you forget what the plot is.
...you flame the creator of a humourous raytracing list for including Toy Story because it wasn't done using a raytracer.
...you were ever dragged out of a theatre for yelling "Cheap rasterized graphics!!!" in the middle of Toy Story
...you ask your non-mathematically-inclined friends if they know the formula for a Bezier patch, hoping that they actually might.
...other people upgrade their computers so they can play Quake and strangle themselves with Office 2000. You upgrade so you can render faster.
...even though you're anti-Micro$oft, you seriously consider putting a Windows partition on your hard drive just so you can use sPatch.
...you look at a wall with a jeweller's loupe in order to figure out its pigment/normal/finish pattern. When you leave, other people cluster around the spot to find out what you were looking at.
...other people's Images directories contain N00D G1F$ downloaded from the Net. Your Images directory contains raytraces that you upload to the Net.
...you spend 11 days on a makefile for a strange flavor of Unix, just to 'do a POV benchmark'.
...you model something perfectly by hand, and then spend 3 weeks writing a useless POV utility to do the exact same thing.
...spend more than 10 render attempts to try and 'find' an object in your scene file.
...dream of real-time raytraced games and game engines.
...remember when POV-Ray 1.0 was new, and POVCad was the only Windows modeller around.
...you own (and USE) a micrometer for scaling objects to raytrace.
...you've ever thought or said out-loud, "I'll bet I can raytrace that!"
...you look at those triangular road signs which have a square background, and wonder why they didn't just alpha-channel them!
...you can write POV files in your sleep -- and do!
...someone asks you to define a word for them and you start off by saying "#declare..."
...you think to yourself "cool lens flare effect" while you're watching REAL lensflares on TV, off car windscreens, etc.
...you catch yourself thinking up random CASE statements to recreate different leaf textures while walking the dog.
...you attempt to model the dog, too!
...you've analysed the photos on the cover of Weekly World News and think that you could have done a more convincing job with POV.
...you actually contemplate spending $$$ at a printing bureau to litho some of your raytraces for your non-computer-literate relatives.
...you think it's a failing of the universe that the large software companies like Corel or Fractal Design do NOT export to POV primitives.
...your friends run Fractint to make T-shirts and ads for raves. You run Fractint to make terrain maps and starfields for POV.
...you despise screensavers because they waste precious CPU cycles.
...the name David K. Buck means something to you.
...you downloaded and printed the Renderman Interface documentation, so you'd have a little light reading to take on holiday.
...your optometrist (whom you've come to know very well, after years of abusing your eyes) comes to you for professional advice.
...your ophthalmologist looks up at you with blurry eyes and tells you he has had complaints from some of his other patients. Then asks if you could recommend any good modeling software or if you have any good source files he could have.
...you're the only person in the world that doesn't think that dancing baby is cute.
...you insist on calling your children Ray, Voxel, Max, Mandel, Tracy, Julia, Vector, or Nurb
...you wonder if ground fog or atmosphere will look better for your company's market share pie chart.
...in the middle of a conversation about child behaviour you suddenly proudly blurt out that you finished rendering the saucer section of the USS Enterprise, thereby confusing everybody.
...you wonder which raytracer God used.
...you spent the whole of Titanic wishing the actors would get out of the way.
...www.povray.org is your default homepage in your web browser.
...you try to find the address of Julia Mandelbrot, because you fell in love with her shape.
...even though you've explained raytracing to them, your family doesn't really understand what you're talking about, and they wonder why you won't just admit you took those pictures with a camera.
...people around you are astounded by the computer-animated tails they put on babies in The X-Files. You complain that it looks fake because they didn't bother to put in the tails' shadows.
...your text editor has macro keys for each and every POV primitive including the poly object and the julia fractal.
...you have gone full circle and find your self writing a scene that contains only a shiny sphere hovering over a green and yellow checkered plane...
...you can't decide which one of your kids you're going to sell on the black market so you can afford the plane ticket to the London PovRay conference coming up.
...you're a scientist, and you start working on multidimensional problems because there's no point in trying to publish raytraced figures of two dimensional data.
...you no longer find people ugly... they have "interesting" faces.
...your screen saver is a piece of paper stuck to the monitor saying "DO NOT TURN OFF THE COMPUTER".
...you can't help thinking that if the world was created in six days then it must have been with anti-aliasing off and only point light sources used.
...you have ever wondered at breakfast what the ior of syrup is.
...you have ever said "I don't need no steenking modellers!!!"
...you visit a neighbour and they tell that they've got a new lightbulb, and they say, "We know how interested you were in the old one, so we've saved it for you".
...you would rather give M. C. Escher a raytracer than give J. S. Bach a synthesizer.
...suddenly, the almost godlike patience required to teach young children comes naturally to you.
...after learning that the warden will let you have a PC in your jail cell, the prospect of a ten-year prison sentence doesn't seem so bad. In fact, the years will go by pretty quick, you say to yourself.
...you can no longer tell the difference between the top raytracing book and the Raytracing for Dummies book. To you, they're both hopelessly uninformed.
...you utterly forget your most basic priorities by telling your wife that her dress is so ugly you wouldn't texturemap distant polygons with it.
...you tell stories to your kids that include stuff like "Once there was a polygon mesh who was very sad because he was only Gouraud shaded."
...you're talking over a romantic candle-lit dinner for two and she says, "Why are you crying?" to which you reply, "I've been trying for years to make a POV-Ray candle flicker like that! boo-hoo..."
...your room loads line by line in the morning when you wake up.
...you think Windows loads fast.
...you are compiling each of these quotes into a big text file... and putting it on your web site.
...you read each of these quotes...
...you're starting to find these quotes more unsettling than funny.
...you wear fuzzy clothing because you prefer soft shadows. (my favourite!)