City through time
One made-up river city, one locked camera: the ways computers have drawn pictures, from text characters to path tracing, then a day, a night and four seasons.
The brief
One riverside skyline drawn the ways computers have made pictures since the 1960s, then Blender’s path tracer for a day, a night and four seasons, from one locked camera.
How it was made
- 45 seconds, 1920 × 1080, one locked camera.
- The first nine stills come from renderers written for the piece, all reading one description of the place: text characters (1960s), vector lines (1963), flat polygons (1967), smooth shading (1971), a 16-colour palette (1977), ray tracing (1980), early 3D (1994), shaders (2001), distance formulas (2008). Then Blender’s path tracer, Cycles.
- Time to draw one still: 0.1 s in text characters, 2.2 s for the 1980 ray tracer, 112.7 s for the path-traced night.
- No downloaded model, texture, sky picture, star map or font file. The stars and the Milky Way are formulas.
- Six real landmarks from three cities on one made-up river; it is not a view that exists.
What still fails
- In daylight the ordinary city reads as boxes with one window grid each.
- Rain and falling snow are laid over the picture: they pass behind nothing and never touch the water.
- Each leaf spray on the near bank is a flat card; palms stay green in snow.
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