EMAIL: alexander.ebel@online.de
NAME: Alexander Ebel
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Desert of the Real
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.desert-of-the-real.de
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 Beta 11
TOOLS USED: Moray
RENDER TIME: aprox. 2 hours
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon XP 1700

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This image is an allegory, a metaphor that shows our life insight our artificial environment which is created by us. The Humans on this Planet are portraied as Balloons. They think of their self as massive objects, but in reality, they are blown up and consist of nothing but hot air and a surface. This shows the superficiality of man. Man only sees surfaces and believes, what he see. Man believes that his environment, his live, his reality was given to him from the outside and could only be altered a little bit by him. But in reality he unconsciously creates all this by himself. So he doesn't live in the "real" world, as he believes, but in a selfcreated dreamworld. Our environment seems to us so real, because it is just like us: A giant balloon - a "luftschloss" which surrounds us, so we bump against it in every direction. It's contact feels comfortable to us. It's our little world, and we like it. But it has a snag: It isn't real. It's just a balloon that waits to get stitched and burst like a soap bubble. And the "real" world, the desert of the real, is full of stings.

When I had the idea of this image, I was inspired from the movie "The Matrix", the book "Simulacra & Simulation" from Jean Baudrillard (from which the Wachowski-Brothers (the authors of Matrix) borrowed the term "desert of the real"), the novels of Philip K. Dick, the constructivism and zen buddhism. The desert itself is inspired from images of the Black Rock desert, northwest Nevada.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I used Moray to model everything. The body of the castle is a superquadric ellipsoid. The towers and the stings are rotational sweeps. The desert-ground is a simple plane. The atmosphere is made of a sphere-containerobject which contains scattering media. You can see, that the sampling-values were too low. This is, because I hadn't enough time for rendering, after I finished modeling :-( I used radiosity, because the side of the castle you see lies in shadow and I didn't wanted to use fill-lights. The lensflare is created by Moray's lensflare-plugin. I wanted to add mountains in the background and clouds in the sky, but I started to late (3 days ago), so I couldn't finish it yet. But I'll make a better version which you can see on my homepage.