TITLE: Worldbowl
NAME: Tim Nikias Wenclawiak
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Tim.Nikias@gmx.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights/index.html
TOPIC: Worlds within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tnw_bowl.jpg
ZIPFILE: tnw_bowl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5 Betas 10 & 11 (Final Version traced in Beta11)

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 7

RENDER TIME: 
    9h 42min 44sec

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.4 GHZ Athlon, 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


"Sitting lonely at his desk, Nick marvelled at the
complexity of the world he could see in the bowl.
And he wondered, if one can grasp "real life"
at all, when even such a tiny environment can't be
fully understood..."

I came up with several ideas for this round, but this was
the idea I liked most. In relation to those lavalamps you
may find youself looking at for hours, I thought, the same
applies to real life. Why not put that inside a lamp?
I've added several other "Worlds within Worlds" components
as well:
The flower ("Flowers say more than a thousand words"), the
letter being written on the desk (again, a different idea
for the same topic, to be found on my homepage entitled
as "Loveletters"), the image on the wall (as being a different,
raytraced world).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


First of all, I'd like to make sure everyone knows, that
I've used no external modeller, I didn't use any
include-file that comes along with POV-Ray. It's all
hand-coded by myself, and I hope it does have a touch
of that "Wow! THAT can be done with pure POV?!"
I know, others have done better, and others will do
better. This was my personal best till today,
but better stuff will surely pop up in the future...
We're all evolving...

It all began with the idea of the lamp. First, I made
some scetches using pencil and paper (really!). After
that, modelling began. The three image-maps required
for the scene to look like the image sent to the IRTC,
I've included all of those (some as smaller versions)
in the ZIP. I didn't include my signature-bump-map,
that's mine...
Paint Shop Pro was only used to draw the signature
bump-map and to convert the former BMP images
to PNG (less size, sharper contrast).

** The Worldbowl **
1. Step - The landscape
I needed a landscape which would be cut off by the glassbowl,
as well as extremely small and detailed. Since image-maps are
rather hard to get more detailed, I went for the pigment-functions
of the new POV Betas and designed a pigment. This would supply the
base for the heightfield. Then, using clipped_by and CSG, three
objects compromise the landscape:
A clipped heightfield-object, a disc to make sure there are no gaps
between heightfield and bowl, and a heightfield-clipped sphere.
Using the new slope-maps, the heightfield was textured according
to height and slope. Since the mountainscape seen in the bowl is
meant to be extremely small-scale, no objects were placed. I
considered placing trees and some huts, but decided that it
could ruin the scale and quality.

2. Step - The ocean
For the water to look enclosed, there is something very important
to know: you may only apply bump-mapping onto the surface that
does not touch any glass. To do that, I used a box-intersected
sphere (matching a declared waterheight) with a non-normal texture.
On top of that, a disc, matching the interior size of the glassbowl,
was placed, using the same texture, but with a normal applied.

3. Step - The clouds
First idea many people'd have would be to go for scattering media
or isosurfaces. I went for the "stacked planes" technique.
I placed several discs with a slightly transparent pigment on top
of each other. The pigment was changed inside the loop, in order
to adjust the bozo pattern's colormap. Add some thought, trial and
error, and voila! There you have pretty realistic, volumetric, though
tracing-intensive clouds.

4. Step - The lamp's lightsources
I've used a new approach: lightsources with rgb-values as high as 10,
but with a quick fade using fade_power and fade_distance parameters.
With a lot of tweaking and the use of artistic freedom, there are
two spotlights. One is pointing at the clouds and the bowl itself,
casting the main light. The second spotlight is positioned and sized
to fill the lampshade with extreme lighting. This way, when viewed
directly, you'll see a white area inside the shade, but in the
window's reflection, you'll actually see the lightbulb.
Another fading, but also shadowless lightsource was positioned
to lighten the entire scene up a bit, simulating radiosity.

5. Step - The Glassbowl itself
The bowl itself is simple CSG, as well as the wooden-like base. The
lamp and the cable were done using a bezier-macro I wrote and
placing several hundreds of spheres and cylinders along a spline.

** The real world **
1. Step - Main background (Sky)
I've used the same approach as in the glassbowl itself. 30 planes,
stacked with the same pattern. The colors were adjusted to fit to
the night scenery. The ocean is a single plane, with a heavily
turbulenced normal pattern. No specular or phong highlighting was
used, but only exponential reflection.
The Moon is an actual sphere placed according to a lightsource,
which doesn't have much impact on the foreground scenery, but on
the lighting of the clouds. The sphere was wrapped with the original
image-map of the real moon, in the ZIP you'll find a smaller PNG
Version. I altered the greyscale color of the moon to something
more purplish, artistic freedom, thanks!
The moon's glow was achieved combining faked flares (a transparent
disc slightly in front of camera) with a sky_sphere pattern. Gives
an atmospheric touch to the sky, as well as slight blinding sensation
to the image.

2. Step - The room
The room was constructed using simple CSG and carving a rudimentary
space out of a box. Nothing really special.
The table consists of several instances of a mesh, which basically
provides one tile: some tiles placed in a loop. Only one
simple cylinder-leg was placed, the others wouldn't be visible and
were thus not placed.
The picture on the wall is one of my older images, of which you'll
also find a smaller PNG version in the ZIP.
The window was made using CSG, and the strange effect you may see
in the frame is actually pretty realistic: the edges of windows
(at least in my windows) do reflect near-mirror like. So there's
not an artifact appearance, but close-detail.

3. Step - The "various" items
The flowers were created with a loop. After I've modelled a single
leaf by clipping a sphere with a cubic-spline-prism, it was placed,
rotated and scaled in order to get the basic, stylistic flower. The
stems are made of spheres and cylinders, using my bezier-macro,
much like the lamp and the cable from the worldbowl.
The vase is a simple cubic-spline-lathe.
The notebook is made of several parts. The first is a box, image-mapped
with the writing (PNG found in ZIP). The second is a spline-based mesh,
which creates the "flapped" page. The curl on the writing was done using
a loop to calculate the positions for some dozens of triangles.
The pencil is made of two parts: a hexagon-shaped prism intersected with
a cone for the tip, and the hexagon-shaped prism for the remaining
section.

** Scene settings **
I tweaked the default ambient-light to .01 to give a very dark
appearance. In the beginning, this resulted in too dark images,
but using the shadowless lightsource solved that problem.
The "stacked planes technique" required a way higher max_trace_level
that I was normally used to, and thus reflections took longer
than before. But patience is something every pure POVer should
have...
At first, I did want to use arealights, but tracing times rocketed
into the sky, and thus left that be. Focal-blur was also considered
in the initial phases, but considering that some 40 lines took
about a day on my fairly fast computer, I dropped that. I just
didn't have the time to wait some weeks...

** The end of it all **
My signature was created using an imagemap as normal for the camera.

That about wraps it up. I hope this text gives some insight into
the mysteries of POV, something I miss on most POV-Entries here.
Some of the models actual modelling may differ from what I wrote
here (I've written this along the making), but most should be pretty
up to date.

But I also plan on making a "Making of..." of this
picture, because I really enjoyed working on it for a long period
of time, and you'll find it at my homepage (when its finished).

And, of course, you may email me if you have questions:
Tim.Nikias@gmx.de