TITLE: Drink and Dream
NAME: William F Pokorny
COUNTRY: United States, the state of Vermont.
EMAIL: pokorny@attglobal.net
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Dreaming
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: wfp_drm2.jpg
ZIPFILE: wfp_drm2.zip
RENDERER USED: 

POV-Ray 3.1g


TOOLS USED: 

For a more complete tool use description see my Morning Glory entry from
the winter round.
In short I used: Moray, POV SDL, Steve's Object Builder, several Scripts,
                 VE Editor,XV,PBMplus,kolors2, mesh compression utility,


RENDER TIME: 
    Around an hour at 1600 x 1200. 700MB.


HARDWARE USED: 
    Various.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When I drink alcohol I can count on a night or two of vibrant, rapidly
presented images as I drift in and out of sleep.  I gather this effect
of alcohol is somewhat common.  Are the images I see similar to what
others see?  Let me know.

This image is an example of a 'frame' of what is usually a series of 5
to 10 images which explode through my eyelids one after another.
The contrast of the images is always extreme. They sometimes wake me.
Each image contains only a few colors.

I work as a chip designer and these flashing images often have a very
high geometric component.  I assume this is because I stare at and think
about geometric images for much of my work day, but perhaps everyone
sees similar things?



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Throughout this image I used random numbers to generate potential
positions for all the objects you see. I wrote utilities to eliminate
collisions and to translate these random positions into POV's screen
description language (SDL). These utilities are throw always, but they
got the job done.

The large, clipped silver balls, the pads on which they sit, and the
shapes which are under them were created first to set an overall pattern
similar to what I see.  Around this framework I randomly placed the
smaller patterns you see.  These objects are themselves rotated randomly
using POV's SDL.

Most of what you see is made up of meshes. For some objects, those which have
a regular radial pattern, I used POV's SDL to build them up after creating
one 'arm.'

There are several uses of small spheres scaled asymmetrically to look
like spindles.

Oh, as part of the utilities written for this image I implemented some
geometric bucketing to better structure the data for performance.  There
are 16 areas defined and objects which are placed in those areas are
part of the matching unioned structures.  These in turn are grouped into
4 larger areas of 4 of the 16 areas.  A clumsy way to say I built up a
tree structure in POV's SDL for performance reasons.

Everything has a metallic finish, all largely borrowed from the metals
include file in the POV tool distribution. Copper and Chrome.

There is one light below everything you see. It is this light
which adds the highlights.

I have included everything but the meshes in the zip file.

Thanks for taking the time. All comments are welcome.

Regards, William Pokorny