TITLE: The Queens's Croquet-Ground
NAME: Francois Dispot
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: wozzeck@club-internet.fr
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/vienna/7709
TOPIC: Imaginary worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fdalice.jpg
ZIPFILE: fdalice.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1 for windows, then Linux (see text)

TOOLS USED: 
    P.T.Dawson's tree Plug-in (hacked a lot!), spilin 1.2, Leveller
0.9884

RENDER TIME: 
    38 h 52 mn using ~112 Mb memory

HARDWARE USED: 
    P200 w/ 64Mb Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


One of the last scenes of Alice in Wonderland.  Alice meets three card-soldiers
which are painting
 white roses in red to escape from the Queen's "OFF WITH THEIR HEAD!"

Alice has always been one of my favourite adult books. Oh yeah, it can be read
by children, but they miss a lot of things,
 especially how logical the behaviour of every character is. Everybody there has
his/her own logic, and applies it up to
 nonsense, like many characters in the Monty Python's Flying Circus, for
instance. Lewis Carol is known as a great
 mathematician and logician, and this book is the best possible proof of this
fact.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The most interesting technical point is not an object or texture, but the
simulation of a "shift" lens: the original
 image is 800x800, and only the bottom was kept. This suppresses many geometric
perspective
 aberrations which would be extremely painful with such a wide angle (70 degrees
= 25 mm focal length in 24x36).

he hedgehog (appearing in the following croquet game scene) is a bunch of random
cones going from
 an inner sphere to an outer cardioid, giving a more natural shape than a simple
pair of spheres.

The grass is a set of 30000 phong-smoothed triangles.

The rose tree is made with P.T. Dawson's tree plug-in, with custom modifications
to add flowers, which are Julia fractals, and to the
 trunk which is a random blob.

The ground was made with Leveller.

The castle is 1000ure CSG, using prisms for hearts and spades.

The cards are CSG macros with many parameters to set the curvature of the card,
legs, arms, and objects in the hands.

The rendering eats a lot of memory, enough to make windoze crash even more often
than usual
, making it impossible to complete the scene. Linux feels fine with it :-).
Editing was made with Emacs POVRay mode.