TITLE: Gallery
NAME: Chris Becker
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: topher@csh.rit.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~topher/
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: gallery.jpg
ZIPFILE: gallery.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Image Compress 1.0, BMP2POV

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours 32 minutes 0.0 seconds (12720 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1900+ 512megs DDR RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Here's my attempt at getting away from 10 lines of code, repeat 10000 times for
this topic.

A picture in a picture in a picture, kind of parallel planes that are all 
dependent upon the previous for existence. And yet, even the farthest painting
is connected to the overall picture. The river of perspective flows through
everything.

From back to front:

SUNSET

The sun setting over a peaceful body of water.

ALTAR

In a universe of eternal night, there is no sun. But here, the gateway
to a world of red and orange and yellow. Bright magnificent colors pour into
this world of chalky pastels.

OBLIVION

A world without color where color is revealed through a chalk sketch. But the
sketch is
not just on the dry wall board, the artist continued on the floor, forming a
river that is bled
from the sketch producing water and sunshine. He even created a bridge to cross
over with.
Think out side of the box.

GALLERY

Three worlds sit within the confines of an artist's gallery. A collection of
universes,
the only thing which separates them is the canvas on which they are drawn. But
is that paper
thin guardian enough? Sit down and look.

(Here's where you all notice the drop of water falling from the frame :)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


From back to front:

SUNSET - 0 hours 11 minutes  37.0 seconds (697 seconds)

A pretty simple image, meant to be a simple water color scene of the sun over
the ocean or
a river. It's actually quite a pretty image on its own if you want to view it in
the zip.
The sun was created using the sky sphere as they do in the help file. The water
and clouds
are just planes and textures.

ALTAR - 0 hours 14 minutes  40.0 seconds (880 seconds)

All the blocks are super ellipsoids, the water is just a plain. The distortion
on the SUNSET image is a warp with some specific turbulence and lambda values
that warp the image and make it look all wavy like water color images are.

OBLIVION - 1 hours  2 minutes  57.0 seconds (3777 seconds)

Just about every object in this scene is a simple POV object. The lamp is a
lathe,
the boards are boxes (with a modified gray wood texture), the wire is a sphere
sweep,
the chalk sticks are cylinders, etc. The effect on the sides of the sketch to
make it
look like it was drawn with chalk is done by intersecting
the box with a roundbox isosurface that is distorted with agate. The chalk on
the ground
are cones for the sun light and water and boxes for the bridge boards. All of
them have
a pigment map of color and clear textures, scaled and rotated to make it look
like it was
drawn by rapidly going back and forth with the broad side of a stick of chalk. 

I had no intention of this, but after I had the whole scene rendered I took a
look
and this image kind of reminds me of the world in the book The Giver. A world of
gray and
samenism where a single individual is given thoughts from the outside, like
color and
emotion. Kind of weird what you find in your own stuff huh?

GALLERY - 3 hours 32 minutes   0.0 seconds (12720 seconds)

The ceiling is the intersection of a pyramidal prism and a box and then with
blobbed cylinders
and spheres added in. The wood behind the painting is a superellipsoid with a
small normal
perturbation and phong added to give it that shine. The pillars are blobs of
isosurfaces
with helixes and tori. The frame is 4 separate isosurface blobs with helixes and
spheres.
The wood on the floor is again superellipsoids but with a bit of reflectiveness
added.

Finally, the carpet patterns were created with POV-Ray by using pigment maps and
some
reflective planes to get the pattern effects. From those images, I wrote a
program to take
each pixel and turn it into a sphere of the same color. This generates an array
of spheres
that resemble the original picture. From there they were all randomly translated
a bit to give
the carpets a bit of bumpiness and the frayed edge effect. I think the effect
was successful.

All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the image, I think it has that bit of
realism that makes
it look nice. Then again, it may be too abstract for some people. Either way,
I'm glad to
put my name on it. :D

Chris Becker
"Topher"
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~topher/




Invader Zim: Why would you do that?
Marzoid: Because it's cooool.
Gir: Mm-hmm.