TITLE: The Observers
NAME: John Robinson
COUNTRY: Scotland
EMAIL: jrobin5@columbus.rr.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.fishinglog.com/Art/ArtMain.html
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jr_obsvr.jpg
ZIPFILE: jr_obsvr.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray v3.5 b11

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray and graph paper

RENDER TIME: 
    about 18 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    PIII 800MHz 320Mb RAM on Win98SE


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

An ethereal city wandering in space where the inhabitants spend their days
looking at the wonders of the universe.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Most of the objects in here are just unions/intersections/differences/clips of
standard primitives.  Prisms are used for most walls and the East Indian style
arches.  I used graph paper to visualize most objects and it saves time and
frustration in the long run.

Sphere_sweeps for the seahorse and railings.  For the seahorse I printed out a
picture on graph paper and drew a spline shape down the middle.  After that I
had all the points I needed.  It wouldn't be much use in a close up, but worked
fine for this picture.  The fountain spray is a blob object.  Railings are just
sine wave macros.

I used the helix function for the columns and one of the planets is an
iso-sphere.

In this scene, while loops and random numbers were my best friends.  For
example, most of the ornamental city in glass is a macro of boxes.  The windows
are (highly ambient) boxes.  A while loop is used to position each window and a
random number is generated for each one.  If that number is greater than 0.4 a
window is plotted. This was a great way of controling how many windows appear -
in this case 60% are rendered.

The triangle flags are bicubic patches.  Random numbers are used for both the
colours and waviness.  The shields are cylinder itersections and also use
random colours and patterns.  Bicubic patches also for the leafy plants in the
pots.

The men were a bit tricky.  They are spheres, cones, boxes and cylinders.  I
spent some time trying to get them right and they can really only be viewed
from the front or slightly sideways.  After a day of tweaking, I finally
decided enough is enough and left them as they are.  Texturing them was a
problem because of their lack of clothing :) so I decided I'd just give them a
single colour.  Their telescopes can be quite hard to make out given the
resolution of the image.

For the trees I used a routine by Paul T. Dawson
(www.netaxs.com/~ptdawson/index.htm) that I found on the internet.  I did
mofify it a wee bit to make the leaves vary from green to red (using random
numbers again) to give them some variety.

All the source is provided and takes less than 140kb but there is lots of lines
in it.  I admit it may look a bit messy but I really didn't plan the scene.  I
just let it evolve itself and this was the perfect topic to do this.    After a
two year absence from Povray it was great to come back to all those new
features but it's going to take an age to get familiar with them.  It's hard to
say how much time I spent, but probably about 3 weeks although some of the
simpler objects I had already made in previous scenes.