EMAIL: paul.houx@xs4all.nl
NAME: Paul Houx
TOPIC: Worlds within worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Glass
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: Mac MegaPov0.7 X
TOOLS USED: Mac MegaPov0.7 X
RENDER TIME: about 270 minutes at 2000x2000 pixels resolution
HARDWARE USED: Macintosh PowerPC G4 350 MHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
I leave it up to you to find the worlds within worlds.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I like POV-Ray for its simple interface and powerfull features. This
image started as an exercise in creating glass. I used MegaPOV, since it
provides features like 'no_image', blinn-shading and Fresnel
reflection.The object is built from several large glass spheres, each
one just touching its neighbour. Inbetween these spheres there are
smaller black ones. The complete structure looks like a sodiumchloride
crystal (otherwise known as ordinary salt).The glass spheres are 85%
transparent and use both blinn-shading (accurate hilites) and Fresnel
reflections (accurate reflections). To boost up the image quality, I
created a white plane that is only visible as a reflection (using the
'no_image' tag).Inside each sphere, there are white and dark-gray
marbles to add complexity to the scene and to better match the current
topic: Worlds within worlds. The reflections too are a world in itself,
being a mirrored representation of the real world.Because the glass
spheres are 85% transparent, they loose a lot of their color and become
very dark. I added a small glow to each sphere to boost its color and at
the same time gain some brilliance.The 'special ingredient X' is a bump
map applied to the orthographic CAMERA. This gives the illusion of
blob-like objects without the modelling fuzz and without increasing
rendering times too much.It takes a lot of tweaking to get results like
this, so be sure to check out the source file for more detailed
information.