TITLE: Diffraction Distraction
NAME: David Bleecker
EMAIL: bleecker@math.hawaii.edu
TOPIC: Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dbdiffra.jpg
RENDERER USED: TrueSpace2
TOOLS USED: Mathematica & Diffract (see below)
RENDER TIME: 1h 17m
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A spherical glass ball rests upon a glass podium with a smooth surface 
which has dodecahedral symmetry (to my knowledge, it is the first SMOOTH 
surface with this symmetry ever to be rendered). The podium has a glass 
base which is an extruded and beveled Reuleaux triangle (a triangle with 
curved sides which has constant width). The base rests on a rug which is 
adorned with diffraction patterns. The left wall has a shiny, bumpy 
wallpaper pattern. It is punctuated by a window with finely rippled 
surface which one usually finds in bathrooms. The familiar diffraction 
pattern in the window is presumably caused by a bright light in the dark 
outside. The other wall has a darker stonelike pattern, which is intended 
to accentuate the stained glass window gloriously lit, irrational as it 
may be, by the early morning sun.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

It was probably not such a great idea to use TrueSpace2 to raytrace a scene 
which could have been done using only POV, especially for a competition 
sponsored by POV. However, I was pressed for time, and experimentation with 
the placement of lights and objects is faster with TrueSpace2. Incidentally, 
TrueSpace2 is fairly cheap now. I bought the SE version for about $100, and 
upgraded to TrueSpace2 for $170. There may be some things that POV can do 
(especially all those things for which the documentation is yet to be written) 
that TrueSpace can't, but I haven't found many of significance to me.

I wrote a Mathematica 3.0 notebook which generates 3D parametric surfaces 
and exports them to *.cob files (the objects in TrueSpace2). With a Pentium 
166, I can smoothly rotate and transform TEXTURED versions these surfaces in 
REAL-TIME in TrueSpace2, and this has been very useful to me as a differential 
geometer. The dodecahedral surface of the podium was generated by an algorithm 
I devised in Mathematica (not cheap, but I need it in my work) and exported 
to TrueSpace2 using the aforementioned notebook I wrote. It has 4096 vertices.

All of the texture maps (the wall paper, stone wall, rug, diffraction pattern 
in the window, the stained glass window) were generated by a single Windows95 
(only) freeware program "Diffract" which I wrote with Microsoft Visual C++ 4. 
It essentially produces a wide variety of colorful intricate diffraction 
patterns depending on numbers that the user inputs. It is freely available (and

not crippled in any way) at the NoNags site under "Graphics Tools (32 bit)" . 
NoNags gave it a rating of 5.5 rubber ducks out of a possible 6. Diffract only 
runs under Windows95 (well, probably NT too). One can simultaneously use texture

maps as bump maps to produce effects such as the raised patterns as in the 
wallpaper of the left wall or for the stone pattern on the right.

The scene file "dbdiffra.scn", all of the texture maps, and a separate object 
file "icos3.cob" for the smooth dodecahedral surface are in the zip file 
"dbdiffra.zip".