TITLE: Seed
NAME: Barry Skellern
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: barryskellern@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bs_seed.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay v3.6

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 3GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Thinking about what to do for the topic of minimalism I decided to keep things
very simple.  The most minimal raytraced image (in terms of object number and
complexity, talent required, time to trace, inspiration, innovation...) is
always the sphere-on-plane combination, so I thought I'd see if I could do a
particularly artistic take on that idea.  I set out to maintain an extremely
simple but attractive form, producing an image which, while technically sparse,
would be eyecatching through its symmetry and use of contrast.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Heh, it's a ball on a plane, how complicated could it be?!  Well, actually the
image involved a lot of tinkering to get it how I want it.

The ball is actually a spherical glass 'shell' with nothing in the middle, using
fresnel reflection and some light attenuation.  The plane, while apparently
simple, was actually difficult to get correct since I wanted the image to fade
from pure white at the top to pure black at the bottom.  I used variable and
non-realistic 'negative' reflection to achieve this.  Also, a micronormal was
used on the plane to blur the reflection of the ball slightly.

The lighting in the image is simple: there are no lights and no radiosity.  In
fact, the only 'light' is reflected from the background, which is set to be a
purple which is 'lighter than white.'  The effect is that direct view of the
background and bright reflections show as white, but anything which attenuates
the light (such as looking through the sphere or the reflections from the plane
at broader angles) gets a purple tint.

To further smooth out the image I used fairly soft focal blur.  This gives the
blend of the ground and sphere into the 'sky' a nice dreamy bloom.  I also
deliberately used a too-low max_trace setting.  Setting the value higher than
about 6, while more physically real, actually led to white reflections around
the dark base of the sphere, which detracted from the colour gradient.  I
decided to sacrifice realism for artistic effect.

Finally, the image had to be symmetric in some way and capture minimalism of
structure.  The ideal thing to use was a vertical symmetry of form while the
colour gradient blended smoothly along and through this symmetry.  Using a
vertical aspect ratio was a natural choice.