EMAIL: youknow@ucan.foad.org
NAME: Tina S.
TOPIC: Worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
TITLE: The Grail's Egg
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.5
TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop (conversion to jpeg)
RENDER TIME: 13 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 400MHz/128M RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Although commonly associated mainly with Christianity, the Grail is, at
its heart, an ideal of purity and faith. It is the hope of the birth of
that purity, the hope that our faith -- whatever it is -- will be rewarded
that the Grail ultimately symbolizes.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

As seems to be not entirely uncommon, I set out with one image in my head
and ended up with something slightly, but importantly, different. It
happened when, in working with Julia fractals to make a swirling cloud, I
curiously tried another keyword and discovered the egg-like shape I
ultimately included.

The image, which had not satisfied me before, was -- appropriately --
reborn. Instead of the Grail being the /source/ for the various symbols
shown (as originally planned), the Grail itself became part of what was 
waiting to be created, out in the great unknown.

The result was much more like what I wanted to say.

Although I could have created an egg with distorted spheres or an
isosurface function, the irregularities in the fractal were an advantage
to help display the items within the egg; there are a few breaks in the
egg's "shell" that give a better display.

The rest of the objects in the picture are relatively simple -- the
hardest to create was the pentacle (which is several half-diamonds);
the easiest, the cross (just two boxes). The cup was sketched out on paper
first and the coordinates for the sor object figured out before hand, so
it looks nearly exactly as I'd envisioned. Likewise, the small "boxes"
that make up the six-pointed star were a result of figuring out angles on
paper and plugging them into vrotate to get the translation amounts right.
The larger celestial bodies are, of course, merely spheres with various
texturing. 

Lastly, the starry field is a sky_sphere with a layered texture to give
two sizes of stars. Both textures use 'granite' with a very small scale.