TITLE: Important Concern NAME: Michael Hartley COUNTRY: Malaysia EMAIL: hartleym@myrealbox.com WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/ofolives TOPIC: Surreal COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: concern.jpg ZIPFILE: concern.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: No post-processing tools. For pre-processing of image maps, I used MS Paint and MS Photopaint. To locate the odd-shaped tiles, I used a program I wrote myself in java. RENDER TIME: about 10 minutes HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium 4, 2.0GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: How do we regard our most important concern? A red moon reflects the earth as seen at night - surrounded by baubles and an irregular tiling of twisted biscuits and the earth as seen from space. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: There are no light_sources in this image. The spheres have some ambient lighting. The tiles are lit using radiosity, and a some emitting media. The tiling is a distorted "Penrose kites and darts" tiling. The kite and dart (most clearly visible near the bottom of the image) tile the plane in an irregular way. I wrote POV-Ray code to place the kite and dart shaped tiles. However, when that took far too long to parse, I wrote a program in java that output a POV-Ray source file. However, the dent in the middle of the tiling is calculated in POV-Ray, not in java. To colour the kites and darts, I downloaded a biscuit and an earth image from http://www.freeimages.co.uk/. I used MS-Paint to convert the images to PNG format and to change the colour scheme of the biscuit (the original was too bright). An image_map in POV-Ray normally maps the image to a unit square. I wanted to distort the image to fit into the odd-shaped tiles, which I did by defining a function from the image_map pigment, defining pigments from the red, green and blue components of the function (after applying the needed distortion), and averaging these three pigments. Can anyone tell me an easier way in POV-Ray to distort an image map at will?? The rest of the image was relatively easy to do. The 'baubles' are randomly placed inside an isosurface/cylinder intersection to ensure they are all above the tiling and below the xy-plane. This same isosurface is used to contain the emitting media (which didn't seem to work how I wanted, actually). The cylindrical maps of jupiter and the moon and the earth at night were downloaded from solarviews.com. I modified the jupiter and moon maps using MS Photopaint, reversing some colours and fooling with the brightness and contrast. The earth at night is on a very large sphere, as if it were the sky. The northern hemisphere is visible reflected in the moon. Some baubles are colour-distorted jupiters, some are mirrors, some are smoky low-ior glass. Ok, lemme be honest - I'm kinda hoping all this math will earn me at least one or two technical merit points... or perhaps math itself is too surreal for that... :-) Mike H...