TITLE: STARPOOL  

NAME: Michael Z. Tyree
COUNTRY: United States of AMERICA

EMAIL: mztyree@sedona.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4079/

TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: starpool.jpg
ZIPFILE: starpool.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows


TOOLS USED: 
    CorelDraw, Photopaint


RENDER TIME: 



HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 350, 128MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This is a planet orbiting a star in the Whirlpool
Nebula.  The Starpool is a portal to other worlds.  When one becomes bored of
the cold geometric world, they can enter the portal and be transported to a
warm organic planet located in a globular cluster of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Or
any of dozens of other worlds.  The small city in the distance is Diaspar,
named after a city in an Arthur C. Clarke novel.  The girl is bringing a
LightGlobe as she prepares to visit a far away planet called Earth.
        

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        Many of the geometric shapes were laid out in CorelDraw and coordinates
taken.  The
portal in particular needed precise coordinates for the circles and boxes of
which it is
composed.
        Also the flagstone-like tiles were plotted in CorelDraw and rotated to
create the floor around the pool.
        The pool and its ascending column of liquid were the most difficult to
create.  I tried
to make it match at the pool level and turn more transparent as it reached the
level of the
Egg.  It also needed vertical ripples in contrast to the circular ripples in the
pool.  I 
don't know if I succeeded at that . . .
        The stars were from a photo taken off the internet at the Space
Telescope Science Institute Home Page and manipulated a bit in Corel
PhotoPaint.
        The tree shadow is just a line art silhouette of a tree with the
background transparent.
        The girl on the left was from a scanned-in photograph I took of my
daughter.  I painted the background blue using Corel Photopaint and made that
color index transparent in the rendering.
        The gold pointed star shapes are small stellated dodecahedrons with a
cutout to make them hollow.  They were fairly easy to make using the math
describing a dodecahedron in the "shapes2.inc" file that comes with PovRay.
        The rest of the scene is pretty standard CSG and texturing.  I would
have liked to have spent longer refining the details and adding decoration. 
Someday . . .