EMAIL: jrobin5@columbus.rr.com
NAME: John Robinson
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Observers
COUNTRY: Scotland
WEBPAGE: http://www.fishinglog.com/Art/ArtMain.html
RENDERER USED: Povray v3.5 b11
TOOLS USED: Povray and graph paper
RENDER TIME: about 18 hours
HARDWARE USED: PIII 800MHz 320Mb RAM on Win98SE

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
An ethereal city wandering in space where the inhabitants spend their days looking at the wonders of the universe.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Most of the objects in here are just unions/intersections/differences/clips of standard primitives.  Prisms are used for most walls and the East Indian style arches.  I used graph paper to visualize most objects and it saves time and frustration in the long run.

Sphere_sweeps for the seahorse and railings.  For the seahorse I printed out a picture on graph paper and drew a spline shape down the middle.  After that I had all the points I needed.  It wouldn't be much use in a close up, but worked fine for this picture.  The fountain spray is a blob object.  Railings are just sine wave macros.

I used the helix function for the columns and one of the planets is an iso-sphere.

In this scene, while loops and random numbers were my best friends.  For example, most of the ornamental city in glass is a macro of boxes.  The windows are (highly ambient) boxes.  A while loop is used to position each window and a random number is generated for each one.  If that number is greater than 0.4 a window is plotted. This was a great way of controling how many windows appear - in this case 60% are rendered.

The triangle flags are bicubic patches.  Random numbers are used for both the colours and waviness.  The shields are cylinder itersections and also use random colours and patterns.  Bicubic patches also for the leafy plants in the pots.

The men were a bit tricky.  They are spheres, cones, boxes and cylinders.  I spent some time trying to get them right and they can really only be viewed from the front or slightly sideways.  After a day of tweaking, I finally decided enough is enough and left them as they are.  Texturing them was a problem because of their lack of clothing :) so I decided I'd just give them a single colour.  Their telescopes can be quite hard to make out given the resolution of the image.

For the trees I used a routine by Paul T. Dawson (www.netaxs.com/~ptdawson/index.htm) that I found on the internet.  I did mofify it a wee bit to make the leaves vary from green to red (using random numbers again) to give them some variety.

All the source is provided and takes less than 140kb but there is lots of lines in it.  I admit it may look a bit messy but I really didn't plan the scene.  I just let it evolve itself and this was the perfect topic to do this.    After a two year absence from Povray it was great to come back to all those new features but it's going to take an age to get familiar with them.  It's hard to say how much time I spent, but probably about 3 weeks although some of the simpler objects I had already made in previous scenes.