my (old) drive is littered with jpg files named temp_mlt.jpg, temp_bmlt.jpg and temp_ppt.jpg
well, not littered, there's only 489 jpgs in total, but for the sake of story lets pretend there's a lot of them
The images were created by the rendering software Kerkythea, which was my main renderer between 2012 and 2016. Kerkythea had a number of rendering algorithms available, including four progressive ones:
- Path Tracing
- Bidirectional Path Tracing
- Metropolis Light Transport
- Bidirectional Metropolis Light Transport
Rendering with these would leave little the little "temp" jpeg files in the render directory, temp_ppt.jpg for path tracing, temp_mlt.jpg and temp_bmlt.jpg for the metropolis light transport respectively. This was possibly intended as some form of backup in case your machine shuts off while rendering. They were totally useless for that purpose however, being saved as quite compressed jpegs with the brightness divided by the number of threads you were rendering with.
Since rendering with these algorithms would always leave a temp jpeg, most of the ones on my drive are just worse quality and darker versions of the final renders, but some of them are leftover test renders because Kerkythea did not have raytracing in the viewport - you had to start an actual render to see what your actual lighting would look like.
I went through the temp jpegs and picked a few ones to showcase in this post. I uploaded the jpegs as is and brightened with the css brightness() filter function for legibility. They seem to have been further compressed on upload however, but that just adds to the found footage quality
An exterior view of an interior cabin scene. The reason I rendered a view from outside was probably to show "behind the scenes" or somesuch to someone, even though I could have grabbed a screenshot from the SketchUp viewport of the scene instead.
A torch with a visible glow outline from the pointlight placed within. I used to place pointlights in light sources to have more control over them instead of having to rely on emission from the texture itself (which would be way too yellow)
The ender dragon. they and other dragons appeared a lot in my renders during the minecraft era, i wonder why?
And yes they have point lights in their eyes (and mouth)
My 2013 dragon sculpt, rendered with a material that I think intended to be chocolate for some reason??
A very blobby looking Nether dragon. A test of subdivision, displacement AND subsurface scattering all at once?
A sports water bottle. I think I made the model for a friend who needed a picture of a bottle for some school assignment.
This one is pretty self explanatory, I was making a TV and made a test card for it even though I didn't have to.
I also made sure to use a correct Minecraft font and not the one where the lowercase T has the crossbar a pixel too high. I can never unsee the wrong Minecraft font when it appears - it was even used on the badges of the first Minecraft convention!!
More ender dragon. This time with fisheye. Kerkythea did not have a native fisheye lens type, but I found that I could point the camera at the backface of a refractive surface (or the front of a refractive surface with IOR less than zero) to achieve the same effect. A neat bonus is that you could then also get chromatic abberation by putting dispersion on the surface.
A test render of a halloween 2014 picture. I think the materials were messed up big time here. October is a cozy month and I love the halloweeny atmosphere. I still make halloween themed pictures every year but this years won't be posted here for obvious reasons.
More ender dragon, but this time small. With the small one I had an excuse to shove dragons into scenes where a full size dragon would not fit, and have them act like regular players/people. Of course I also sometimes did shove a full size dragon into places they would not fit properly.
This one is literally just the Kerkythea cube primitive rendered with a hdri background. The jpeg was so dark that barely any color/luminance information is left.
The oldest temp jpeg I could find. Dating back to november 2012, it was the first time I tried one of the progressive render algorithms in Kerkythea. I remember wondering "Why the Fuck is it so Noisy", not realizing I could just wait for more samples and the noise level would decrease. Then again I was rendering on the CPU of a 2008 era laptop so things didn't exactly go quickly. I ended up rendering this scene with the biased photon mapping + final gather algorithm instead.
When I stopped using Kerkythea, the temp jpegs stopped appearing (obviously duh) but they remain as a glimpse into the past.