DKBTrace
DKBTrace was a graphical
ray tracing program which was the forerunner of
POV-Ray. It had no
GUI and ran via the
command line. It featured
quadric shapes (spheres, ellipsoids, planes, etc), constructive solid geometry (intersection, difference, union), and procedural textures like wood and marble.
It was originally written for the
Amiga by David Kirk Buck (1986). Aaron Collins ported it to the PC and worked with David to produce subsequent versions. The last version (DKBTrace 2.12) was built in 1991 and ran on Unix systems, PCs and Amigas. Version 2.12 was released to the
POV-Ray team to use as the basis of
POV-Ray.
You can find some early history written by David K. Buck at the
POV-Ray site:
*
The Early History of POV-Ray*
The Original Creation MessageSome of the old versions of DKBTrace are still available on the
Aminet site. They were also released on disks 397, 513, and 514 of the famous
Fish disks distributed by
Fred Fish.
