“Pikachu Village”
When I was 10 years old, my dad introduced me to POV-Ray, a 90s-era 3D raytracing program. This was the first time I had seen a real tool for making 3D computer graphics, and it felt like a whole world opened up to me. Over the next several months, I obssessed over POV-Ray and trying to learn all the things I could do with it.
This “Pikachu Village” scene, from March 2004, was the very first really large POV-Ray scene that I wrote. It was a meticulously hand-crafted text file of some 10,000 lines, using POV-Ray's scene description language (but only the most basic features because those were all I had learned).
Modern renders of original scene
For a long time, even though I remembered it keenly, I thought this POV-Ray scene was permanently lost to history. Then one day my dad found an unlabelled backup disk sitting disconnected at the bottom of an old computer case he had in storage. And for the first time in over 20 years, I beheld the scene again that helped shape my dreams and career ambitions.
See below for an in-browser explorable reconstruction of Pikachu Village.