TITLE: Marbles
NAME: Matthew Welch
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: daffy-duck@worldnet.att.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.squaregear.net/raytrace
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: marbles.jpg
ZIPFILE: marbles.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.5.beta.11

TOOLS USED: 


RENDER TIME: 
    52 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.2Ghz Athlon

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


When we heard the topic the idea came to us to try to incorporate the
planets of our solar system. We also thought immediately of how when 
a child is playing a game they can become absorbed in their own world.
So we put those two ideas together and came up with this scene. Each
marble is a different planet and the one in the center is the sun with
the sky reflected in it.
The blacktop represents outer space. The chalk circle which is used in the 
game of marbles was a nice way for the worlds to be contained within
our world.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


My girlfriend Libby Paletz and I worked on this image together. She
acted as artistic director, coming up with the idea and guiding the
overall look of the image. I was the gearhead doing all the coding to
make it work.

There are actually very few objects in this scene. The ground is a
plane, the marbles are spheres, and the stripes in the background are
a couple of boxes. Only two stones (the ones that form Saturn's
"rings") were modeled. The rest are all part of the plane's texture.

The ground is all one plane, with an extremely comlex texture on it.
It consists of texture maps upon texture maps.

The planet marbles are scaled logarithmically (except the sun, which
even logarithmically would have made one huge marble). Their distance
from the sun is in order, but not scaled in any way. I just tried to
get a fairly even distribution of marbles. The inclination of each
axis is accurate except for Jupiter which was exagerated in order to
show off the big red storm better.

Thanks to http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/ for the maps of the planet
surfaces.

Thanks also to Chris Colefax for the lens effects include file.