POV-Ray

A FORTRAN scene for POV-Ray was likely created around the year 2000 by Kurt Bangert, and shows the characteristic companions of a common FORTRAN programmer: continuous form paper, Hollerith punch cards, legacy reference book, Snoopy calendar, and alcoholism. The source code listed on paper is taken from Will Crowther's Adventure (~1976).

The following files are required to render the scene:

• fortran.pov --- POV-Ray scene
• cdemo.pov --- Corona test scene (optional)
• corona.inc --- Corona bottle (fixed)
• for4.gif --- replaced by similar texture, as original is missing
• manta.gif
• punchcard.gif
• snoopy.gif
• source.gif

The book cover texture for4.gif is not included on the website, and therefore, has to be replaced with a similar GIF image.

On FreeBSD, POV-Ray can simply be installed from Ports:

# pkg install graphics/povray37

Release 3.7 is the first to support SMP.

Rendering

We start the rendering by calling POV-Ray with file path, quality, and output size of the scene:

$ povray37 +I./fortran.pov +O./fortran.png +V +Q9 +A +H480 +W640

The output in 640x480 takes about 30 seconds on an Intel Core i5-7200U. For 4000x3000 resolution, more patience is required:

Render Time:
  Photon Time:      No photons
  Radiosity Time:   No radiosity
  Trace Time:       0 hours 14 minutes 26 seconds (866.282 seconds)
              using 4 thread(s) with 3356.502 CPU-seconds total

In comparison, an Intel Xeon D-1541 renders the same scene in slightly more than four minutes:

Render Time:
  Photon Time:      No photons
  Radiosity Time:   No radiosity
  Trace Time:       0 hours  4 minutes  1 seconds (241.946 seconds)
              using 16 thread(s) with 3844.774 CPU-seconds total

Rendered Scene

• fortran.png (320 KiB) -- FORTRAN scene rendered in 640x480
• fortran_big.png (8.1 MiB) -- FORTRAN scene rendered in 4000x3000

Created: Tue, 20 Apr 2021 17:39:31 +0200