You know you've been
Raytracing
too long when...

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You've been
in graphics
too long
when...
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  • 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 ask your non-mathematically-inclined friends if they know the formula for a Bézier patch, hoping that they actually might.

  • Other people upgrade their computers so they can play Quake and strangle themselves with Office 95. You upgrade so you can render faster.

  • You find yourself wishing you'd paid attention in math class to all those formulae you thought you'd never have any use for in real life.

  • Even though you're anti-Micro$oft, you seriously consider putting a Win95 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.

  • 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.

  Contributed by Neil Clark <clark@ionet.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!"

  Contributed by Gerhard Bouma <ghjbouma@freemail.nl>:
  • You see an obviously rendered animated GIF you like, and instead of using it "as is" you try to figure out how to make it yourself.

  Contributed by "Rarius" <pcowley@totem.co.uk>:
  • 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!

  Contributed by "the Morrigu" <holychao@swbell.net>:
  • Someone asks you to define a word for them and you start off by saying "#declare..."

  Contributed by Chris "I drank what?" Upton <deimos@sans.vuw.ac.uz>:
  • You think to yourself "cool lens flare effect" while you're watching REAL lensflares on TV, off car windscreens, etc (I've really done that before)

  Contributed by George Erhard <dcnblues@geocities.com>:
  • ... 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.

  Contributed by Mark Kadela<kris@dgraph.com>:
  • .. you think that the evolution theory was based on the triangular origin of the wheel.

  • .. you wear fuzzy clothing because, you prefer soft shadows.

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