TITLE: Infinite Worlds
NAME: Darren Izzard (SeDi)
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: sedi@geocities.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/4156
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dimgwrld.jpg
ZIPFILE: dimgwrld.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1a (MS-DOS)

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Leveller, POV-Ray 3.1 Superpatch (Win95), Paint Shop Pro 4

RENDER TIME: 
    4hrs 41mins 36secs

HARDWARE USED: 
    133MHz Pentium, 38Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A vision of just some of the infinite number of worlds emerging from
the human imagination (or, perhaps, my somewhat limited imagination!).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The mountains and ice-world heightfields were made using Leveller.
The face-mask, fish and water-weed objects were made using sPatch.

The "whirlpool" emerging from the top of the face is made of rotated
rings of spheres differing in size (they get smaller the further to the
left and right of the image). The liquidy texture is a bozo pigment with a
high-turbulence onion normal.

I developed most of the scene in Superpatch, but the whirlpool seemed to
crash POV-Ray under certain circumstances (the key seemed to be the
combination of a certain blue light and the whirlpool). So I tried rendering
the scene using the official MS-DOS POV-Ray 3.1a, and that worked fine.

The two planets are generated by a macro I wrote, with lots of parameters!
Basically they're each made of two concentric spheres, with some quite
complicated textures. (The outer sphere supplies the cloud layer, with the
inner sphere (land and ocean) showing through.)

Because there are a number of different "sets" in this scene, each with
slightly different lighting, preventing light from one set interfering with
another was a problem. There are a number of concealed walls (hidden behind
other objects) which I've used to prevent light from spilling between the
ice-world and mountain-world sets, and into/out of the cityscape set. The
ring at the top of the face is a similar device, stopping light from the
whirlpool set shining on the back of the face mask. In contrast, some of
the objects (namely the fish, water-weed and the pillars and beams on top
of the wall) have no_shadow set, to prevent other lighting problems and
unwanted shadows.

Long-time IRTC'ers with a good memory may recognise the smiling star object,
which is based on the one I created for my "Night Vision" picture in the
"Night" round of the IRTC last year.

The starfield behind the planets and mountains is a modified version of
the "Starfield" texture from the standard POV-Ray "textures.inc" file.

nb. The computer monitor in the lower-right of the image is displaying my
"Elements" IRTC entry, also from last year - yet another Imaginary World.

(The title/byline text in the top-left corner was added using Paint Shop
Pro 4.)

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