TITLE: Puzzled
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Mystery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: puzzled.jpg
ZIPFILE: puzzled.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray, Poser, Poseray, Gimp, Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    around 10 hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1900, 1GB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I read in a book somewhere that the universe is just a mirror reflecting our
selves.  In another book, I read about quantum mechanics.  In a third book, I
read that if we ever discover the true nature of the universe, it will
instantly disappear in a poof of logic and be replaced with something even more
mysterious and bizarre.  I wonder how many times this has happened already.  I
also wonder if this makes us the puzzle solvers or the puzzle makers.  But most
of all, I wonder if the people responsible for replacing all those old
universes are getting overtime pay.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image was kind of a rush job.  I wish I had more time to put in a little
more detail, but life had a tendency to interfere this round.

The puzzle is made from 5 height fields created with The Gimp.  One for the
solved part of the puzzle, two more for the pieces scattered around the edge,
another for the pieces on top of the puzzle, and the last for the piece being
painted.  The texture is an image of the Tarantula nebula from the Hubble
telescope with a reflecting finish.  Thanks to both NASA and STScI for thier
hard work and for releasing these images into the public domain.

The person is, of course, from poser converted with Poseray.

The candles were made with subsurface scattering techniques I learned from old
posts to the povray newsgroups.  Thanks to all the posters for sharing thier
ideas and techniques.  They're made from a transparent shape with scattering
and absorbing media with a slight refraction and a copy of the shape scaled
down slightly with an opaque texture.  I just wish I had more time to tweak it
a little more.

Everything else is CSG.  The jars and candle holders are lathe objects.  The
scissors are prisms and cylinders.

I used a scattering media to give the image a softer look

I didn't include the source or textures for the person in the source zip file
due to Poser's license.  Hopefully one of these days, I'll have enough skill to
model my own people so I don't have worry about all these licenses :).  The
source for everything else is in the zip file and any comments, criticism or
advice is greatly appreciated.