EMAIL: paul.houx@xs4all.nl NAME: Paul Houx TOPIC: Worlds within worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Glass COUNTRY: The Netherlands WEBPAGE: N/A RENDERER USED: Mac MegaPov0.7 X TOOLS USED: Mac MegaPov0.7 X RENDER TIME: about 270 minutes at 2000x2000 pixels resolution HARDWARE USED: Macintosh PowerPC G4 350 MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I leave it up to you to find the worlds within worlds. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I like POV-Ray for its simple interface and powerfull features. This image started as an exercise in creating glass. I used MegaPOV, since it provides features like 'no_image', blinn-shading and Fresnel reflection.The object is built from several large glass spheres, each one just touching its neighbour. Inbetween these spheres there are smaller black ones. The complete structure looks like a sodiumchloride crystal (otherwise known as ordinary salt).The glass spheres are 85% transparent and use both blinn-shading (accurate hilites) and Fresnel reflections (accurate reflections). To boost up the image quality, I created a white plane that is only visible as a reflection (using the 'no_image' tag).Inside each sphere, there are white and dark-gray marbles to add complexity to the scene and to better match the current topic: Worlds within worlds. The reflections too are a world in itself, being a mirrored representation of the real world.Because the glass spheres are 85% transparent, they loose a lot of their color and become very dark. I added a small glow to each sphere to boost its color and at the same time gain some brilliance.The 'special ingredient X' is a bump map applied to the orthographic CAMERA. This gives the illusion of blob-like objects without the modelling fuzz and without increasing rendering times too much.It takes a lot of tweaking to get results like this, so be sure to check out the source file for more detailed information.