TITLE: Elements fraktal NAME: Micha Riser COUNTRY: Switzerland EMAIL: mriser@datacomm.ch WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/7992/ TOPIC: elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mr_elem.jpg ZIPFILE: mr_elem.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.1b4 for DOS running under LINUX TOOLS USED: galaxy.inc RENDER TIME: 2 hours 53 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 300, 64 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The four classic elements, Water, Fire, Earth and Air, as elements of a tetrahedronical fraktal with a galaxy background. In the middle the four elements are arranged at the edge points of a tetrahedron. I used this arrangement because it is the most natural way to arrange four objects, in this way each of them four has the same distance to the others. Around the four big version of the four classic elements there are the three other elements arranged so that they build, together with the big one, another tetrahedron. And around the smaller version of the elements there are again smaller version of them in a tetrahedrionical arrangement and around them again even smaller and so on... Note that each element is unique, there are not two which look exactly the same way. Theoretically there would be an infinit number of elements which get always smaller and smaller. But because my memory and my time is not infinit I had to stop at a certain level, namely at level 6. For them who haven't recognized the structure yet, I have included a picture to my .zip file (135kBytes) in which the structure is shown by cylinders and the elements are symboliced by spheres. As background I chose a picture of I galaxy. I did so, because I imagine this fraktal to be somewhere in the space, else the objects would be too much influenced by the gravitation - e.g. the Water would fall down. Also the earth is locatet somewhere in the galaxy and water, fire, earth and air are the elements which make life possible on the earth. And finally I think it looks good as background. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First I wrote a macro (I'm glad there is pov 3.1!) which calculates the location of the edge points of the tetrahedrons and recognizes which type of element is at which point. Hugh, at that time I was very glad to have learned the vector geometry in school - well, I think that was the first time I could really use it. Next I had to depict the water, the fire, the earth and the air. The problem was that four the use in the fraktal the objects had to be spherical orientated, that means there was not allowed to be an up and down with the objects, nor had they been allowed to be a infinit objects. I couldn't 'Earth' depict as a plane or a high filed nor I could show 'Water' as a river, the 'Fire' had to have flames going away to all directions and 'Air' couldn't be indicated by a sky. So I wrote a macro (again happy about this feature in pov31b) which generated a clod of earth by a blob object. The water also is generated by a blob but it is not so compact like the earth and forms drops. Four the fire and the air I used the media command. So the first thing I had to do was to acquaint myself with this new feature of pov 3.1. The fire doesn't look like a classical fire but more like a little sun, which is actually the fire which makes our earth not be cold but gives us an agreable, life enabling warmth. Each of the four macros had to be depending on a random, so that by chaning the random value it generated similar, but not same, looking version of the elements. I had also to make them dependend of a quality factor, because the smaller the object appears in the pictures the less had the quality of it to be. If all the objects shown were in the same quality like the biggest one, the scene would have taken too much memory to be rendered. Four the background I used Chris Colefax's galaxy include file for POVRay. Finally the scene was rendered in 800x600 using Antialiasing 0.3.