TITLE: The Fractal Temple
NAME: Andreas Kahler
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: kahler@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
WEBPAGE: http://home.pages.de/~kali/
TOPIC: Physics & Math
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fractmpl.jpg
ZIPFILE: fractmpl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0 (Win95,IRIX version compiled by Andy Wardley)

TOOLS USED: 
    LParser LSys xfractint PaintShopPro xv PERL vi

RENDER TIME: 
    12 hours 53 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 

  Rendering: SGI Indy   
  Modelling: 486-100MHz & SGI Indy


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This is the fractal temple, the most holy place in universe (well, as
far as you only believe in maths..)
The master of the temple is sitting ehm.. flying in the center of
the temple surrounded by several fractal, recursive self-similar or
other interesting maths objects: the Escher Knot, a 3D version of
the Hilbert curve, a 3D julia fractal and a 3D variation of the
Koch snowflake.
Below the master is a recursive pyramid, the temple corners are
recursive cubes. The corner column tops each consist of two 
Mandelbrot sets, the mountains in the background are a julia fractal
heightfield. On the floor of the temple there is a fractal
mosaic.
For the pyhics fans there is the flash. It is the visualized
power of maths.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The FLASH was the hardest part of the scene. I wrote a PERL
program to get a zigzag blob with cylinder components. Each
of this components includes a emitting halo. There seems to be
a bug in POVRay3 (yes I know halos are an experimental feature,
but this cost my many hours...) : the halos are not correctly
translated and rotated with their container objects, the blob
components. If you have a look in flash.inc you can see I avoided
this by adding the halo after transformation and applying the
same transformation again only to the halo.
The flash does not look like a 'normal' flash but was modelled 
after a photo I found in a book describing the Farraday cage effect.

The MASTER of the temple is created using a heightfield which was
painted by hand in PaintShopPro and a pigment map, which is a
freshened up picture of an old Chinese statue of the monk Ganjin.
3 planes were used in a CSG to cut the heightfield to the right 
shape. Some refraction and iridesence was added to the surrounding 
glass sphere to give it a more interesting look. The surrounding
flash is a partially transparent pigment map, which was created in
POVRay and then modyfied with PaintShopPro.

The ESCHER KNOT was created using POVRay's #while directive.
The knot is a blob with sphere components which were translated
using functions for every axis.

The SNOWFLAKE variant is a recursively created object consisting
of unions of tetrahedrons. The chrome PYRAMID below the master 
is recusive as well.

The 3D JULIA FRACTAL is made using POYRay's internal 
julia_fractal statement. iteration_max is too small to have
an exact object, but it looks much nicer this way.

The DOME with its golden arcs and the HILBERT BLOCK are the
only objects in the scene which were not modelled by hand in
an text editor. They were created using lparser and lsys.
The tropism effect was used to give the round shape to the
dome. The gold texture used is not one of the standard textures,
because the looked too dull in this scene (the environment is
too dark).
Although the hilbert block was also created with lparser
(it is based on a included demo file by the author, Laurens Lapre),
I had to correct many angles in the output POV file (does anyone
know why??)

The base cube of the COLUMNS are recursivly modelled in POVRay 
using the #include directive. It is based on sponge2.(pov|inc)
by Steve Demlow, which is a demo scene that comes with POVRay3.
The columns itself are a CSG intesection object made of cylinders
capped by spheres. The column tops are a mandelbrot heightfield
intersected with a drop-like prism (2x), a torus and a sphere.
The golden base is a rotated part of the Koch snowflake curve.

The floor MOSAIC is a partially transparent pigment map (created
using fractint) on a marble texture. Some reflection was added to
make the scene look more realistic.

For the GROUND a bozo pattern is used to make it look like
very dry ground. It is layered by a  partially transparent 
texture which fades to dark blue in the distance.
The MOUNTAINS which are a heightfield (a julia set created with
fractint and then blured) have a texture which gets brighter the
higher they are.

The SKY have the most complex texture, which has 4 layers:
1: basic sky color
2: small clouds (using bozo)
3: big clouds (using bozo)
4: lets the clouds fade to consant color in the distance