TITLE: Sphere NAME: Bernard Hatt COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: bmh@arkady.demon.co.uk TOPIC: Catastrophe COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: image.jpg ZIPFILE: image.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6.1 TOOLS USED: MicroEMACS, pngtopnm, cjpeg, RCS, Linux (Slackware) RENDER TIME: 8h HARDWARE USED: Athlon 2500 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Too many people just construct a reflective sphere on a checkered plane without bothering to check if the plane has sufficent foundations to take the weight, this is what can happen .... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Most of the scene was created with CSG, the pieces of the broken plane are made from an intersection of 3 height fields. The main sphere is constructed from the difference of two spheres (inside and outside) intersected with a wedge (vertical) and cylinder (horizontal), I put a bounded_by on the 'sphere bricks' to improve rendering time. I was trying to create a ceramic tile look to the checkered plane with an average of the bozo and quilted normal patterns. Getting the plane to look good was more tricky than expected, as there were aliasing artifacts near the horizon, even with Antialias_Threshold=0.0, my solution was to us a pattern for the plane which faded with distance (from the origin) which also deals with the darkening towards the horizon, and to use focal blur. The pieces of broken plane are all triangular and defined by an arrays of points for the corners, patterns for the edge (so that adjacent peices match), and a rotation and translation for their position. Most of the complete spheres in the background and the sphere segments are randomly placed, with a few extra ones added where I thought it needed it.