EMAIL: samuel@boxtop.com
NAME: Samuel J. Goldstein
TOPIC: Glass
TITLE: Heart of Glass
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.commwerks.com/~libelle (temporary)
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.01
TOOLS USED: Fractal Design Poser 2, DXF2POV
RENDER TIME: 05:08:10
HARDWARE USED: Sun, dual 168MHz UltraSPARC, 128M memory
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Ah, February. The month when Valentine's Day whips the card-sellers
into a frenzy. The month my girlfriend told me that if I spent another
evening rendering pictures, she'd leave me for good (just kidding).
What else could I create, but a picture of a relationship postmortem:
a view of the Heart of Glass.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The heart polynomial was taken directly from a scene done by
Tore Nordstrand (tore@maxwell.fi.uib.no) that (I believe) was on the
POV-Ray CDROM.

The cracks are formed by doing CSG with a height-field, which comes from
a hand-drawn GIF. Although it's not highly evident in the image, the
breakage of the heart has a cone "popped" out of the back, not unlike
what a BB does to a glass window. This, too, was simple CSG.

The 3D depressed guy was created in Poser, exported as a DXF, and converted
using DXF2POV (the 2D depressed guy was a frame-grab I did back in the
days I had long hair).

The landscape was created by rendering a quick POV-Ray texture/lighting
scene, and using it as a height-field.

I didn't have time to add a recursive cactus-grower to populate the desert.

I tried rendering this on my Mac (120MHz 604/80M), but after three days I
gave up. I got a co-worker with a fast Sun system to install POV-Ray, and
rendered it in a paltry 5 hours.

This was my first POV-Ray picture in quite a while. I don't have as much
time any more to create scenes without a modeller, and we poor Mac-using
stepchildren don't have much in the way of tools that are POV-Ray
compatible.
It was a mixed experience: the power of POV-Ray is exceptional; the ability
to create awesome skies and landscapes is great.  But there were
frustrations as well -- the error in the root solver (the horizontal crack
across the heart is an error), and the fact that you can't declare a
polygon mesh to be solid (or use them in CSG).

___Samuel___