At the occasion of a recent Slashdot story about the POVRay competition, I came across the work of Gilles Tran.
What amazed me at first was the incredible level of control over the creation process of Computer Graphics, especially considering they are all done with POVray. If you don’t know POVray, just know that it would be an understatement to say it is user friendly. Using POVray is an extremely powerful way to make 3D images, but the amount of components and scripts to learn, and the lack of mainstream graphical interface for both composing and rendering scenes is a blessing as well as a curse.
As I browsed through the galleries, the sheer poetry of the images is what really stayed with me. The ‘variations’ gallery, for example, has a very surrealistic theme. Even the most realistic scenes have something poetic in them, like a flock of birds in the shape of a gigantic hand, or a concerto of streetlights above a busy street.
These galleries are a labyrinth of magnificent images, detailed tutorials and resources for fellow graphists available for free. To make it even better, most of the site is placed under a Creative Commons License.
It is comforting to see more and more sites embracing that idea.