TITLE: Infinity
NAME: Malte Marwedel
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: m.marwedel@onlinehome.de
WEBPAGE: Have one, but neither in English nor about raytracing
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: infinity.jpg
ZIPFILE: infinity.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6.0

TOOLS USED: 
    KPovModeler, GIMP

RENDER TIME: 
    9 hours 46 minutes 0 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1800+ with 512MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Well the image shows the extreme opposite of minimalism - the infinity. But the
image consist only of extreme simple objects. Cubes with one single simple
color, one light source and nothing else. So in this way it is minimalism.
Imagine an universe which is perfect stable, consisting only of equal boxes in
every direction and equal distance and orientation among each other. What a
place!
      

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Some months before I tried to make a similar image (with alternating red and
green boxes), by simply using three loops in another placing boxes at different
X,Y,Z coordinates. But this method has a big disadvantage: Memory usage, since
there were n_ boxes.
So now for this image I tried an other way: First placing long (in the Z axis)
boxes along the X and Y axis within an union. Then I did the same with the X
and Z Axis, letting the boxes go deep into the Y Axis. Then both unions are
placed in an intersection. So every time the long boxes overlap, a cube is
generated. There should be 47*44*51 = 105468 cubes in the scene. It is like
placing your hands in an angle of 90_ over an other and every time a finger
from the one hand touches a finger from the other hand a visible object is
generated. So there is only the need of memory for 2*n_ instead of n_ objects
in the scene. The disadvantage is that this method is much slower.
The classical problem, you have to choose between high memory or CPU usage.
Oh and you need to move one union a little bit on the X Axis to prevent
artifacts (black pixel), since otherwise POV-Ray could not decide on some
surfaces which color from the two unions it should use.
Finally I used GIMP to convert the output file into jpeg. The png file without
the jpeg artifacts look much better.
I've added the source so if you like, you can render it yourself.
Thats it. I hope it is minimalism enough.

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