TITLE: Inside the desert land of our very thought
NAME: No_ Falzon
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: noe.falzon@tiscali.fr
WEBPAGE: http://noe.falzon.free.fr/
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nf_deser.jpg
ZIPFILE: nf_deser.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6.1 for the Macintosh

TOOLS USED: 
    None

RENDER TIME: 
    about 20 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    iMac G4 1.25 GHz, 256 Mo of RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Inside the desert land of our very thought



Robert Frost - Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it_it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less_
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars_on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.



The last strophe of this poem reminded me how vast is our mind, how deep and
complex are the folds of our thoughts. Introspection is a matter of loneliness
and immensity. There is nothing more than you in your head. This is a desert. A
cold blank human-free desert.

There is no need to travel a lot, or to find the places where there is no one to
have a desert. As Robert Frost tell it, you don't need sand, or snow to have a
desert. There is an infinite desert in each of us.

That is the reason why I chose to make an abstract image, instead of a
traditional "desert" of sand or snow, or even a clean boatless ocean. Plus, I
like the idea of "empty space" between each little island of existence.

So, the image represents a unique sphere, flexible and bumpy like our mind, in
an infinitely vast room, with black walls which reflects each-other endlessly.
On these walls are green lines of light, which delimit an infinite number of
cells, the thoughts, the memories.

At last, there is red floating light in the distance, like a beacon, a guide for
the mind lost inside himself. A kind of conscience, which helps the mind to
choose his path among the desert of his own thoughts.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

It is quite simple in fact :
- the floor and the ceiling are black, reflective planes.
- the green lines are cylinders, placed with macros (hey, you wouldn't think
there's a idiot to code 1100 cylinders one at a time, right ?), and with high
ambient setting to make them glow.
- there is a black fog to avoid moire effects with all the lines in the
distance, and also to give a feeling of infinity, since we can't see where stop
these green thing.
- the red light is simply... a red light, between the two planes.
- finally, the bumpy sphere is an isosurface. It is the point that was really
difficult ; not only to write the formula (which took me 15 minutes...), but to
texturise. Actually, as everything is very dark in the scene, a reflective
sphere would have been ugly. I couldn't find something interesting (I got a lot
of pale colors, very "greyish", and tintless) until this final result that
quite satisfy me (finding the finish and the pigment is always the hardest for
me).

At the beginning, I wanted to make some dark image, in black and white, and with
a lot of grainy focal blur, but liked the contrast between pure red and pure
green. The black color (even if painters say that it's not a color) gives (in
my opinion) a great intensity and deepness to the image, and makes another
contrast, with the bumpy sphere which is quite bright, and very contrasted
too.