Demo scene from the "Opticks" ray-tracer for the Amiga (1989), re-rendered in 2020
 

Demo scene from the "Opticks" ray-tracer for the Amiga (1989), re-rendered with an emulator in 2020 @ 1280x800

Here’s a shout-out to the original publisher -> Incognito Software.

I have also rendered this in 4k res, and it seems it could do double that or more.

If anyone is thinking of finding a copy on the Amiga boards, hold off… a cleaned up version is in the works. The covid-19 virus has put my plans of getting the manual scanned back a bit.

Looks great :) Btw: How long did the render take in Uae ?

Someone else asked me about old vs new...

> How long did the first render take?
Too long ago to remember. We did a render for a slide at 1000x667 and I’ll guess it was about 2 days. (A1000)

> How long did the emulated render take?
I think it was 1-2 hours. Note that I upped Max Reflections from 6 to 9 as well. I am running as a "68060" and suspect there are more emulator options to enable for speed.

Edit: Opticks also has a version of the scene builder and renderer compiled with 68020 and 68881 options, the base exe's use software floating point. I don't believe we had the chance to test them back in the day. I gave them a quick try but get a Guru Meditation error. If someone knows more about UAE and how to try those, let me know. Compiled with Manx C.

Looks like my post isn't getting seen in this room. Is there another to post to?

Ah, these old renders trying out million reflection bounces :)
Looks great! :great

In Chipset options try checking out "immediate blitter".
But even more importantly, in CPU and FPU option check "JIT"

On Lightwave, when JIT is on, render is so much faster, then when it's off. :)

I always wanted to buy Opticks but could never find it in the shops.

Thanks for the good words!

Max reflections is set to 9... not a million :)

Thanks for the feedback too, but the tips made no difference. Since higher-res renders are to disk w/o screen display, I didn't expect the blitter option to do anything. I had hopes for JIT but no improvement there either. What is JIT about? I know the Just-In-Time acronym but not sure what it does in this context.

You're in luck, I know someone with a copy! ;)

I've been meaning to call the book scanning shop again to see if they're doing anything in the back room, but expect they're struggling a bit too. Maybe the downtime is a good chance to do a small (for them) scan. If not, I may post it w/o the manual.

JIT FPU mode also enabled? Make also sure FPU mode is 64-bit host (80-bit is usually much slower and rarely needed)

Looks great. I never heard of the Opticks renderer. Got to look into that one.

Advanced settings were grayed out but I turned on the CPU Internal FPU and it ungreyed that section, FPU Support checked, 16MB cache. No change (or slightly slower).
Note that this was compiled for the 68000 with software FP, so perhaps there's no hook to move the FP over to the FPU.

At the time (1989) I also compiled a 68020 / 68882 version (Manx) but it's been crashing. Don't think we had hardware to test it back then, so I'm not sure if there's an old or new issue.

Edit: Ohhh, it looks like it's actually a 68020 / 68881 compile, perhaps I was trying 68882 in WinUAE.

New upload in the zone! Looking for people to review the zip contents, does it all make sense? Also, does the "Your first test of Opticks" part work as described on page 2 of Opticks-Intro work?

New upload in the zone! Looking for people to review the zip contents, does it all make sense? Also, does the "Your first test of Opticks" part work as described on page 2 of Opticks-Intro work?

Love these old raytrace pictures with all these crome reflections :cool