EMAIL: matt@alledora.co.uk NAME: Matt Walton TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT TITLE: Bottled Worlds COUNTRY: United Kingdom WEBPAGE: http://www.alledora.co.uk (coming during March 2002) RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.5 beta 11 for GNU/Linux TOOLS USED: GNU Emacs 21.1 (scene file creation and editing) Steve's Object Builder 1.5 (modelling of bottle) The GIMP 1.2.1 (conversion to JPEG) all running on GNU/Linux RENDER TIME: 5 hours 27 minutes 25 seconds HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon Thunderbird 800MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: At the lowest level, this is a world within a world, quite literally - or rather, a planet within another planet, like those Russian dolls which stack inside each other. But these two worlds are also in a bottle, which stands within another world - and who knows how many worlds the world the bottle stands is is contained by. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: It's all modelled by hand except for the bottle, which is modelled sort of by hand using Steve's Object Builder, a useful Perl module which generates POV-Ray objects from Perl function calls. I suppose I could have modelled the bottle in POV-Ray itself after some thought, but I was originally planning to make the shape a lot better than it currently is. Unfortunately I ran out of time... The first incarnation of this image was going to be a city in a bottle. The bottle, however, went hideously wrong - it was made of a CSG merge of various primitive shapes, which produced the perfect bottle shape but unfortunately the merge wasn't able to remove all the internal surfaces, and so when transparent it looked terrible. So I switched to this one, which should probably be a lathe in all honestly - might have rendered a lot faster. Still, the smooth triangle mesh which Steve's Object Builder produced does make some nice effects in the highlights. The reason the city vanished was because that was looking awful as well, and I didn't have the time to detail it properly. This is my first IRTC entry, and I knew it wasn't going to be very good, but honestly, that city was awful. If I ever get it right I'll put it on my website (when I've written it). So I decided to put an Earth-like planet in the bottle instead, and then came the idea of putting another planet inside that to really emphasise the theme. Four bottles in the scene took all night to render less than 25% of the image, so I had to settle for one as time was getting short. There's nothing spectacular about the planet - just some layered textures really - water first, then land, then clouds. They both have scattering media around them for atmospheres, but with the caustic highlights that's more or less invisible. Those highlights, the result of using photons, caused me some concern, and I would have tried to fix them - but I ran out of time. Too much other stuff to do - maybe next time the topic's something I think I can do I'll get an earlier start at it and actually do something decent. Notice at the top of the inner planet how the shadow just looks totally horrible. I do rather like the effect the photons had on the bottle though... The surface the bottle's standing on is just a plane with a granite pigment and a granite normal. The scene was rendered with photons on, max_trace_level = 255 (and it used all of it) and adc_bailout = 0.1, antialiasing on (threshold 0.3, method 2) at 1024x768. The zip file contains the scene file, the include file output by Steve's Object Builder and the SOB source Perl script. This is all that's needed to render the image, although why you might want to is beyond me.