EMAIL:
 hartleym@myrealbox.com
NAME: Michael Hartley
TOPIC: Surreal

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: Important Concern
 
COUNTRY: Malaysia

WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/ofolives
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: 

No post-processing tools.
For pre-processing of image maps, I used MS Paint and MS Photopaint.
To locate the odd-shaped tiles, I used a program I wrote myself in java.

RENDER TIME: about 10 minutes

HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium 4, 2.0GHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

How do we regard our most important concern? A red moon
reflects the earth as seen at night - surrounded by baubles
and an irregular tiling of twisted biscuits and the earth as
seen from space.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

There are no light_sources in this image. The spheres have some ambient
lighting. The tiles are lit using radiosity, and a some emitting media.

The tiling is a distorted "Penrose kites and darts" tiling. The kite and dart (most clearly visible near the bottom of the image) tile the plane
in an irregular way. I wrote POV-Ray code to place the kite and dart
shaped tiles. However, when that took far too long to parse, I wrote a
program in java that output a POV-Ray source file. However, the dent in
the middle of the tiling is calculated in POV-Ray, not in java.

To colour the kites and darts, I downloaded a biscuit and an earth image
from http://www.freeimages.co.uk/. I used MS-Paint to convert the images
to PNG format and to change the colour scheme of the biscuit (the original
was too bright). An image_map in POV-Ray normally maps the image to a
unit square. I wanted to distort the image to fit into the odd-shaped
tiles, which I did by defining a function from the image_map pigment,
defining pigments from the red, green and blue components of the 
function (after applying the needed distortion), and averaging these
three pigments. Can anyone tell me an easier way in POV-Ray to distort 
an image map at will??

The rest of the image was relatively easy to do. The 'baubles' are
randomly placed inside an isosurface/cylinder intersection to ensure
they are all above the tiling and below the xy-plane. This same 
isosurface is used to contain the emitting media (which didn't seem
to work how I wanted, actually). The cylindrical maps of jupiter and
the moon and the earth at night were downloaded from solarviews.com.
I modified the jupiter and moon maps using MS Photopaint, reversing
some colours and fooling with the brightness and contrast.

The earth at night is on a very large sphere, as if it were the sky.
The northern hemisphere is visible reflected in the moon. Some baubles
are colour-distorted jupiters, some are mirrors, some are smoky low-ior
glass.






