TITLE: Nar-Cissus
NAME: Thomas Nelson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tdark@io.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.io.com/~tdark
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: narcisus.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV

TOOLS USED: 
    POV, Paint Shop Pro (BMP-Jpg conversion), AC3D (3DS - POV
conversion)

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII 400

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The Story of Nar and Cissus

The spirit Nar wandered alone through the eternal shadows of the Infernal realm.
 In the distance he saw a light, a reflective pool guarded by four blazing
fires.  Approaching cautiously he knelt beside it an gazed into its depths. 
And as he looked, the pool cleared and he saw into another realm, and there,
the spirit Cissus looked back at him. 

Each reached out to the other hoping to end their solitude. Ripples went out
from where their hands broke the surface, shattering the clarity of the image. 
Each ripple was a mortal world existing for a brief flicker of eternity in that
pool between the Celestial and the Infernal.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

First a little credit where credit is due:
Those spectacular columns are from Steven Pigeon's (pigeon@iro.umontreal.ca)
colonnes.inc file, and the male and female figures are from 3D-Cafe (no credit
was given there aside from "HumanCad").  The Celestial tree was generated using
Sonya Roberts' trees.inc.  Also much thanks to David F. Rogers and J. Alan
Adams for their wonderful book "Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics".

The image itself is reversible,  By changing the camera position you can see
Cissus kneeling by the pool gazing at Nar.

In order to create this scene I had to write a number of macros for dealing with
splines, bezier patches and "twisties".  I will post the source code for these
on my web site.

The stands for the fire bowls are twisties following a spline path.
The fire is actually 4 twisties.  3 with cones of different sizes placed at
intervals along the twisty and one hollow twisty with a scarlet emission
medium.

The tree on the Celestial side of the pool was generated using Sonia Robert's
trees.inc.  I got the fuzzy effect by replacing the fruit with small clear
spheres with an emission medium and an agate density function.

I wrote a macro for generating the wings.  It takes a frame of 4 points and the
number of fingers which divide the wing.  It generates a bezier patch for the
initial wing and then begins dividing it up into multiple patches.  The fingers
and arms of the wing are drawn using blob splines along the edges of the
patch.