TITLE: flight to freedom
NAME: Jessica Bushnaq
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: abdalla.bushnaq@d.kamp.net
TOPIC: insects and spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: firefly.jpg
ZIPFILE: firefly.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray coding

RENDER TIME: 
    about 4h

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 800

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

a dragonfly avoiding the nets, following the moonlight, trying to reach
freedom.
Its chance of archiving success is - well, better not think about it too much.

A word about the (foreseeable and just) comments about: this is not a dragonfly:
wings are too wide,
eyes are too round and so on.
I began by looking at photos of dragonflies, contemplating the complicated
delicate wings,
algorithms tumbling in my mind in crazy knots.

At one point I began to think cruel and messy thougts about dragonflies and
scanners.

At this point I decided to throw reality overboard and go off hunting after the
dragonfly in my mind.

This is not a dragonfly but the dragonfly-image in my mind (with a little bit
butterfly-feeling mixed in).

(Other possible line of defense: 130 million years ago, there existed a
dragonfly species looking
exactly like this. Sadly, no fossiles of it can be found.)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

My first idea was the construction of a spider web.
To archive that, I began to write a geometric libary. (intersection points
between two
lines and others).(geometric.inc)

Then I wrote a macro to generate a spider web between three
points.(spidersweb.inc)

Last I constructed the dragonfly. To generate the wings, I wrote a sort of
recursive
"tree macro" (split the branch in two branches, the branches in branches and so
on-stop
if you hit the end of the wing) and played around with the parameters until the
look
of it began to get right.(dragonfly.inc)

For sky, water and moon, I made heavy use of the tutorials of Michael Hough.
Water normal is a curious mix between a gradient z and two onion patterns.
I was stunned that it worked and left it at that. 

a word about the include files:
geometric.inc should be semi-stable.
spidersweb.inc has still a bit of dirty programming (Things, that should be
parameters
written in hidden corners of the code as constants)
dragonfly.inc : The recursive macro is dirty programming all over

I packed the files in the zip anyway (better bad code than no code.) I plan to
work
further on geometric.inc and spidersweb.inc as soon as I have a little time for
it.

So if someone desires a stabler, better documented and less german-infected
version of them,
e-mail me, I send them as soon as they are ready.