EMAIL: wozzeck@club-internet.fr
NAME: Francois Dispot
TOPIC: Imaginary worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Queens's Croquet-Ground
COUNTRY: France
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/vienna/7709
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 for windows, then Linux (see text)
TOOLS USED: P.T.Dawson's tree Plug-in (hacked a lot!), spilin 1.2, Leveller 0.9884
RENDER TIME: 38 h 52 mn using ~112 Mb memory
HARDWARE USED: P200 w/ 64Mb Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

One of the last scenes of Alice in Wonderland.  Alice meets three card-soldiers which are painting
 white roses in red to escape from the Queen's "OFF WITH THEIR HEAD!"

Alice has always been one of my favourite adult books. Oh yeah, it can be read by children, but they miss a lot of things,
 especially how logical the behaviour of every character is. Everybody there has his/her own logic, and applies it up to
 nonsense, like many characters in the Monty Python's Flying Circus, for instance. Lewis Carol is known as a great
 mathematician and logician, and this book is the best possible proof of this fact.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The most interesting technical point is not an object or texture, but the simulation of a "shift" lens: the original
 image is 800x800, and only the bottom was kept. This suppresses many geometric perspective
 aberrations which would be extremely painful with such a wide angle (70 degrees = 25 mm focal length in 24x36).

he hedgehog (appearing in the following croquet game scene) is a bunch of random cones going from
 an inner sphere to an outer cardioid, giving a more natural shape than a simple pair of spheres.

The grass is a set of 30000 phong-smoothed triangles.

The rose tree is made with P.T. Dawson's tree plug-in, with custom modifications to add flowers, which are Julia fractals, and to the
 trunk which is a random blob.

The ground was made with Leveller.

The castle is 100% pure CSG, using prisms for hearts and spades.

The cards are CSG macros with many parameters to set the curvature of the card, legs, arms, and objects in the hands.

The rendering eats a lot of memory, enough to make windoze crash even more often than usual
, making it impossible to complete the scene. Linux feels fine with it :-). Editing was made with Emacs POVRay mode.