TITLE: Azathoth
NAME: Mark Anderson
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: m_n_anderson@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: azathoth.jpg
ZIPFILE: azathoth.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    the GIMP, for bmp-jpeg conversion.

RENDER TIME: 
    1004 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 mobile


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


XXII. Azathoth
Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me, 
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space, 
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me, 
But only Chaos, without form or place. 
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered 
Things he had dreamed but could not understand, 
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered 
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned. 
 -- H.P. Lovecraft, The Fungi from Yuggoth 

There are several references in Lovecraft's fiction to Azathoth, the 
blind idiot god at the centre of all reality.  In several of his works, 
supernatural travels from Earth's reality to Azathoth's court are
described; these usually involve travelling through arcane dimensional
space incomprehensible to sane humans.  This image is my attempt at an 
abstract visual interpretation of that journey.

So, what does all this have to do with decay?  There's a common theme
in Lovecraft's work:  the ordered reality you see around you doesn't bear
close scrutiny, because the closer you look at it, the more the alien, 
inimical and horrific meta-reality becomes clear.  Lovecraft's protagonists
do this all the time; they start out in neat and tidy New England, poke
around too much in dark corners, and inexorably descend into madness.

The journey from Earth to the Court of Azathoth is a great example and
metaphor for this degenerative process.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Isosurfaces are great. Azathoth (the big rumply ball in the middle) is an
isosurface. The yellow paths are a Ring_Sphere from Friedrich A. Lohm_ller's
shapes_lo.inc (thanks to Friedrich for the useful tool).  There are six spheres
with a high-res Earth texture from NASA's Blue Marble image release (probably
overkill, given the small size of the spheres in the final image).  All these
objects, and a 360 degree fisheye camera, are enclosed in a reflective
superellipsoid.  There are only 21 objects in the whole scene.