Tag: seasons

One Spring’s Month

A month in the spring can make a huge difference. Move your mouse over the image (or click the image) to see the difference between April and May on the Fulton School campus.

The full sized images can be seen here.

Note: To embed the image above use:

<iframe style=”overflow:hidden;” src=”http://earthsciweb.org/js/images/spring/spring.html” width=490 height=326 seamless />

POV-Ray: 3d rendering

Giles Tran’s amazing rendering of glasses on the counter inspired me to check through my own POV-Ray generated library. Nothing nearly as good, but some of it is still might be useful.

Demonstrating the axial tilt of the Earth, this image shows the Earth at the northern hemisphere's summer solstice.
Rotating Earth at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice.

You build 3d models in POV-Ray and then export 2d images from whichever point of view you want, so once you have the model set up you can easily change the perspective or even move objects to create animations.

POV-Ray does not have any useful sort of user interface; you’re usually creating your models with computer code. It can therefore be challenging to use, and, as with any 3d programming language, a bit of geometry, trigonometry and algebra are needed.

However, the final results can be impressive. I’m continually amazed each year by the quality of the work added to their Hall of Fame.

For much easier, quicker and not so sophisticated 3d results, I use VPython, which is also a great way to learn programming that outputs 3d images.