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Thomas's Ray Tracing

Graph of Andromedia's free trial requests over time

The above image was generated with POV-Ray, from data generated by Andromedia's ARIA Recorder/Reporter. In particular, this data represents the "Free Trial Requests" made to our company web site from a week or so before Christmas to the beginning of February.

The data was extracted with a Perl script, and then used to create a POV-Ray input file. POV-Ray did the rest.

This is really just a whim of mine - I wanted to see this data in a calendar format, but with bars I was getting too much hidden data. I tried cones first, but they looked a little too strange, even though they did allow for clearer visibility. I settled on this nice simple "nail" look.


This next image uses GIFs as a POV-Ray "pigments". It was used in the main index to my photoshop album.

There is one interesting detail here - the labels for "Family" and "Friends" are visible, but you would be looking at the labels for "Outdoors" and "New" backwards. I could have just "flipped" them, but instead realized I could ensure that the shadows projected by the backwards letters were readable. This gives the object a nice symmetry, eh?

Photos

This next image was created to be a front-piece to my contract bridge web page. This is a new version of one of my first images; it is heavily based on the sunsethf.pov demo code that comes with POV-Ray. Most recent change was to add rounded edges and "tilt" the cards more.

Other card-based images:
Copyright 1997. Thomas Andrews (thomas@thomasoandrews.com) .