EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr
NAME: Miroslav Hundak
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Whirl
COUNTRY: Croatia
WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Texture View
RENDER TIME: app. 23 hours
HARDWARE USED: PII(450/100), 64MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Basically it's a water whirl in a small round pool under an alien sky.
Simple, but kind of nice looking.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I had absolutely no idea about what to do for this round. No, actually
the topic is so broad that I had too many ideas, so in the final
despair I decided to use some of my modified test works for this image.
I took one underwater ior test, added some unusualy colored sky (greenish
with yellow horizont) and a few fancy details to the pool, including small
area lights (12 of them), a few silver and gold crosses and a lava red
bottom. To water I added a large vortex with some random-sized bubbles moving
in a spiral.

There's also a plastic ball sitting on the water surface just to show off
the radiosity effect and to take the edge off of the seriousness of the
whole image.

Anyway, it's out of this world.

Rendering was done with anti-aliasing threshold 0.2 in radiosity quality, and
it took forever to render.

About the original test rendering:
I wanted to test the refraction capabilities of pov-ray renderer, and
to see if it can simulate the "total reflection" effect, when a ray of
light hits the surfuce from the denser side thus refracting to a bigger
angle. When this angle becomes 90 degrees or more the total reflection
occurs and the ray bounces of the surface instead of going along it
(when it refracts to 90 degrees), thus acting as a mirror, blah, blah,
blah. This effect is used in optical fibers and it can also be seen if
you look from underwater to the surface.
Appearantly it works.