TITLE: The Separation of Light and Darkness NAME: Victor Woeltjen COUNTRY: U.S.A. EMAIL: skywise@fix.net WEBPAGE: http://www.fix.net/~skywise/ TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: vw_separ.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.00 TOOLS USED: N/A RENDER TIME: 43 minutes, and 21 seconds HARDWARE USED: 450 mHz Pentium II IMAGE DESCRIPTION: When I first read this month's topic, I didn't really have any specific ideas as to what I was going to make... I had a few fleeting ideas of images of war, but I figured there would be more than enough of those already, and I personally prefer much more surreal sorts of rendering (mainly because it's much, much easier :) )... It took a while for this to come to mind... To start with, I was just playing around with heightfields contemplating what sorts of images might work for the topic in an original way... Like I said, I didn't want to try for realism, 'cause that's not as fun, or as easy (in my personal opinion)... After a bit of random messings around I ended up deciding on trying to do some sort of depiction of the Creation of the Universe, most likely in Biblical terms... I guess that's sort of history... Sort of... A little bit... Anyway, after more random messings around, I stumbled upon some need looking background textures (which ended up not being used in the image, ironically... At least, not in their original form). In test renderings, I came out with a sort of starry looking background, except sort of more like strange nebulae type stuff... It was just the way the heightfield up top reflected into the texture, actually, and because I got rid of the reflectiveness in that particular texture it kind of lost that whole effect anyway... That's pretty much beside the point, which is that the test renderings showed a clear and striking separation of light and shadow in the backgrounds, in a way that just looked really damn good. So, I settled upon my actual topic: The separation of light and shadow. So, that's what it is. The separation of light and shadow. From the Book of Genesis, basically, though I didn't really go by the text or anything. Just the general idea. Light is on one side, darkness is on the other. The universe is represented with the arrangement of spheres and the torus. Why? Because I think it looks neat :). Up top, the Creator of the Universe is a triangle of the three essential colors: Red, green, and blue. I chose this representation mostly because of the way Milton described God in Paradise Lost. He was, according to Milton, a being of purest light. The natural course of action would have been to just have a white formless shininess up there, but because I already had the big white mass to the right of the image I wanted to go with something a bit different. I decided to break the light of the Creator of the Universe up into its three basic components, as we (humans) apply them today. And I did. I think that's all there is to say. Actually, that's probably more than there was to say, or at least more than what was due, but I'm generally not too good at being concise, so blug. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was a very, very simple image to create. Aside from the heightfield and the torus, EVERYTHING is spheres. Everything. You could probably tell that already, though. I really didn't use a wide variety of much of anything in this image. I wanted to keep it simple. The Creator of the Universe is made up of halos. Light and darkness are also halos. Halos are my favorite thing in POV-Ray :) Also, there's the primitives with the mirrors. Mirrors are great. Having minimal experience in real-life photography, I appreciate the ability to have a reflective surface perpendicular to the viewer without having it show me holding a camera and looking foolish. I love mirrors. Mirrors are great. I love to go crazy with mirrors in POV-Ray, as some of you may remember from my last submission. Mirrors are great. Then there's the heightfield, which is a heightfield. It's kinda dull, but it grounds the picture kind of nicely with its lack of unfamiliarity. I think so, at least. It's just there to break the monotony a bit. Then there's the background, which is just a big hollow sphere that surrounds everything. I started off just taking the mirror texture and adding bumps, but it evolved a bit from there to what you see now. Just a bit. That's all. It wasn't an amazing feat by any means, but it shows that you can generate some interesting imagery very easily if you don't mind keeping things simple. So, ta-da. I didn't include the source because I doubt anyone could really learn anything from it, and I'm too lazy too comment it anyway. If someone really wants a copy for some strange reason (drunkeness I'm thinking) then just email me at skywise@fix.net. If you want to send me insults for submitting such a stupid, barely-on-topic image, then just email me at skywise@fix.net. If you want to buy a llama, you'll have to look somewhere else. Oh, one last thing: I hate the camera angle I used. It's uninventive. I'm also much too lazy to rerender it from a different angle. Bweh.