TITLE: Shadows of Consciousness
NAME: Mike Anderson
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: mike_r_anderson@yahoo.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.mikera.net
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mshadows.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    None

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours, 4 minutes and 38 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 800MHz, 256Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Two suns cast their light over this surreal scene. A river divides
two sandy dunes, rippled like the exposed hemispheres of the human
mind. Cracked pillars are all that remain of rationality and
civilization. Two cannons roam unchallenged over the dying
landscape. Can any hope be salvaged here?



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The image was created entirely using POVRay.

The sand was perhaps the hardest element to get right, each bank
of the river is a single large isosurface using a fairly complex
mathematical function to get the desired shape and pattern of
ridges.

The sky uses scattering media to give the effect of rays from the
two suns. I think this was what really slowed down the render time
in this image. The two suns emit subtly different colours of
light, which gives a great surreal look to the lighting and
produces plenty of colourful shadows. The ray effect is produced
by applying a texture with variable transparency to the sun
spheres.

The dying trees are generated using my own hand-rolled macro,
heavily tweaked so that I could get the right chaotic and twisted
look for the branches.

The cannons are CSG and isosurface combinations (I make no claim
to historical accuracy here). The same method was used for the key
and chain of beads. Although it's hard to see in the final image,
the beads use a simple but effective way to create a cut-glass
look - they are just the intersection of ten randomly rotated
cubes. The red, green and blue of the cannon wheels and the beads
are of course a subtle homage to the three primary colours of the
digital artist.....

The bridge is made out of isosurface bricks, which are positioned
on the surface of an imaginary cylinder by another custom macro.
The effect came out quite well, I'm especially pleased with the
"cracks" that you can see in the shadow to the left of the bridge.
With hindsight, isosurfaces are probably overkill here, but they
do have the advantage of looking very good in closeups so maybe
I'll get a chance to put them to good use in a future IRTC entry!

The water is fairly uninteresting. I experimented a fair bit with
isosurface waves and transparent media, but they didn't really
help the image and just slowed down the rendering time so I stuck
with a simple flat lake effect.

Finally, the pillars are CSG objects, intersected with an
isosurface to give the effect of the broken tops. I used a
procedural texture to make the grey outer surface transition into
the red-veined rock at the core.