All created MPEG-movies were constructed from individually ray traced frames (anti-aliasing was disabled). A resolution of 320x240 pixels was used (24-bit colour depth). The computer was an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 900 MHz, equipped with a CardExpert GeForce2 MX graphics card, running Windows 98.

Click on the small images to download the full movies.

My first movie was this rotating world-globe. It's a texture-mapped sphere which revolves 360 degrees. At the same time, four lights (a yellow, a blue, a red, a green, and a white one) rotate around the sphere, perpendicular to the sphere's direction of rotation. Duration: 11 seconds (1.7 MB)

The torloid is a fascinating object, it therefore was quite a challenge creating a movie that showed a fully rotating torloid. Every torus rotates 360 degrees around its center, so you can see tori revolving around tori... Also note the nice changes when the shadows pass over the objects. Duration: 11 seconds (1.7 MB)

This small movie zooms in on a quadric (a paraboloid) and a yellow sphere. After the zooming (notice the effect of the atmospheric attenuation), different turbulence-strengths of the marble quadric are demonstrated. The solid texture of the quadric is then changed and the light moves from right to left. After this, the reflectivity of the quadric diminishes while that of the small yellow sphere increases. Finally, the gloss strength of the yellow sphere is gradually increased, resulting in a severely blurred reflection. The gloss strength is then reduced to zero, resulting back in a sharp reflection. Duration: 31 seconds (4.4 MB)

Refraction is a visually interesting phenomenon; the way a glass distorts the underlying texture as it moves is a challenge for any modeller. In this movie, a glass sphere is moved over a photograph of a zebra. The sphere is located closely to the photograph, resulting in a severe distortion. The sphere first moves from left to right and then back to the center. Then, it moves backwards, briefly disappearing behind the photograph and then moves to the front, encapsulating the viewer, and to the center again. Refraction is then disabled (resulting in pure transparency with unbend light rays) and the translucency strength is increased, resulting in blurred transparency. Duration: 54 seconds (7.5 MB)

This movie demonstrates the effect of a solid texture's changing parameters: two dimensional coordinate lines are used on the floor with varying distance. Then the eyepoint and viewpoint are changed. Next, three spheres descend from the sky: a brick texture mapped sphere, a water texture mapped sphere, and finally a transparent sphere (notice how the brick sphere is initially visible through the transparent sphere, albeit deformed). Then all the spheres move away. Duration: 27 seconds (3.9 MB)