TITLE: A study of the super ellipsoid and photon NAME: Tekno Frannansa COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com WEBPAGE: http://evilsuperbrain.com TOPIC: Minimalism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: photons2.jpg ZIPFILE: photons2.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6.1 TOOLS USED: povray editor Irfanview (to resize & convert to jpg) HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 3200+ 2.22GHz 1GB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Okay, I'll be honest, this is totally designed as a wallpaper image! This was the first thing that came to mind when I read this topic, though I don't know why. Small objects on a white plane just has some resonance with the word minimalism for me personally. Having said that, in my opinion this image is not minimalist! Certainly there is not a lot of content in the image, but minimalism is the expression of something in it's most basic form, and this image does not express any deeper concept. It is simply an arrangement of glass blocks that is pleasing to the eye, there's nothing of which this is a minimal expression. Nonetheless, it got a very positive response on povray.binaries.images, so I submit it here as a simple visually pleasing abstract for people to enjoy. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Most of the work on this image went on the glass material, it has all the effects I know of relating to glass: -reflections with fresnel falloff -large phong highlights to give a "sheen" effect (using pov's metallic effect on a black material, to make it obey fresnel, which for some reason pov doesn't inherrently support on highlights) -sharp specular highlights -refraction, obviously -colour as an interior property, not a surface property, so the amount of colour depends entirely on the thickness of the glass. The lighting is radiosity with photons, plus a single light source with accurate inverse square fall-off. Other than that, I use a loop to place the objects and vary their parameters. And I think that's about everything... Pretty minimal really :)