TITLE: Universa ut ludo NAME: David Fam_ COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: davidfama@supereva.it WEBPAGE: not yet TOPIC: Surrealism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: un_ut_do.jpg ZIPFILE: un_ut_do.zip RENDERER USED: Pov - Ray TOOLS USED: Pov - Ray and Photo Impression 4 (for the alias name Unifex Espiante) RENDER TIME: 0d 7h 58m HARDWARE USED: 2.66 GHz - 512 Mb DDRam IMAGE DESCRIPTION: My idea for the topic was to interpret it literally. Surrealism: everything above reality...and then I thought that the only thing above the human reality is the reality for a race of Gods (Gods for our point of view), or maybe only an alien race above our concept of reality. I tried to give an image of our solar system in a water universe, with an "Alien" who is playing/creating a new planet/star. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my very first image ever done...and I work on it for 20 h in total after a reading to the beginners tutorial that I download (2 week ago) with povray renderer. I tried to use almost everything explained in the tutorial since this has to be a kind of abstract of what I understood of povray. However: -> the sky is a simple sky-sphere with a color-map. -> the planets are solid geometry with CSGs. -> the borning planet is an isosurface. -> the sea is an isosurface merged with a plane. -> the sheets of paper are bicubic-patches. -> the hand is made with blobs and solid geometry. -> the nebulosa is made with media. I used an isosurface for the sea to provide some waves around the planets: this waves are sin-waves with a gaussian slope. Also the borning planet is made with an isosurface because I tried to give the impression that the cristal ball is retracting from the hand of the alien while he/she/it is creating the planet inside the ball. The hand of the Alien is hollow because I wanted to fill it with the same "material" of the nebulosa. The Nails are coloured with image-maps of various deep-skyes...a reflection of the Universe. Problems: I had some unsolved problems with several objects of my scene. First of all, the borning planet seems to be coloured with a map and not filled with a media...and this brings to an enormous error like the fact that the hole reveal the sphere as empty and not filled with the nebula, as I wish. I tried to enclose the nebula in a sphere pigmented with "Clear", and it worked out, but the reflections made the sphere visible and I don't like it at all. The second big problem is the hand: it is too simple, it has no particolars, and there is a problem in the position of one nail. I could not work a lot on this problems and on others, but the result is not so catastrofic...so I decide to submit this image...in particular to take some advantages from your critics...hoping also in some little tips...