TITLE: Thirst of Christ NAME: Robert Fremin COUNTRY: Sweden EMAIL: rof@mail.com WEBPAGE: http://fly.to/robertf/ TOPIC: Worship COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: thirstcr.jpg ZIPFILE: thirstcr.zip RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.1g.watcom.win32 Pentium II optimized TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (Signature), Compupic Pro (JPEG conversion) RENDER TIME: 26m parse + 1h 29m render time @800x600 recursive AA l.3 HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 600MHz, 256MB, pencil & paper IMAGE DESCRIPTION: My attempt at abstract symbolic art. What would the Earth and it's inhabitants be without religion? Very possibly much happier. The grimmest religion of them all has proven to be christianity, which have killed in the name of God for 2000 years. Crusaders, inquisitions and missionaries have slaughtered people in the past, now it is just plain people doing the same. Northern Ireland and middle east is just some places where God is used as an excuse to kill each other. Sects, cults and free churches make mindless drones of people, using distorted versions of an old book to prove their point. Taking all their drones their money and making them dependant of it too. Making the leaders a God, herding flocks of sheep. This is of course just my opinion. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: How did I first come up with the idea? Well, "worship" made me immediately think of money, so I used altavista to find me a nice pic of a dollar bill and doubled its size and retouched it with PSP. So I made a nice wobbly dollar bill, and thought of what's next to fill out the image. Hmmm, religion, maybe all religous symbols I could imagine, making a field of religion? I made one cross, but found out it looked like sh*t. Grass, I thought. Lots of grass with one single fallen stone in the middle, and the bill. And that's the way it started. As a software developer I enjoy the fact that the code is complex, yet very compact in this image. I am a veteran in IRTC really, competing from 1997 to 1999, but have had a 2 year break because of the time and the inspiration that just haven't been available since. I have some unfinished, unpublished work as proof of my efforts to do something about it. :) * The dollar bills Image map painted on a triangle mesh generated through manipulating sine functions. Random deviations make each bill similar, but not identical. * The blood A blob made from randomly modified spheres, until I was satisfied. I made it look just that thick and shiny I have seen in movies. I myself haven't lost a pool of blood yet to study material behaviour. ;) * The religous cross Just boxes and cylinders with granite function materials. * The grass OK, the hard part. The grass straws are different at different depth to save rendering time. In front they have leaves and stem, all tilted randomly. Then comes straws with simpler leaves, and beyond that there are just triangles. The straws are placed in a x by z pattern with a little random deviation to make a evenly filled grass field. To save even more time I marked the camera edges and then made the grass field a trapetsoid shape, just where the visible area is. Around the cross I didn't want grass sticking through the stone, so I made collision detection functions to avoid placing straws at forbidden positions. Actually I made it scale down the straws at those positions so that it wouldn't look like bare ground over there. The straws have also random shade of green of course. Some straw leaves cut through eachother, but what you don't see (at glance) won't hurt you. Everything is lit by a 3 by 3 area light. There is also a sky sphere above, and a ground plane (not so visible) with dirt texture function.