EMAIL: pedro.ramos@netcabo.pt -or- pedro.ramos@mail.pt 
NAME: Pedro Ramos
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: What is Within What?
COUNTRY: Portugal
WEBPAGE: -none-
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 beta 11
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.3 shareware
RENDER TIME: 7 hours 30 minutes
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1 Ghz; 384MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This was a relatively difficult topic, because it could be interpreted in
very abstract manners. Worlds within Worlds? How do you depict that in an
image?... I chose a somewhat abstract manner of interpreting the topic.
Nowadays, it's not uncommon to read (or watch) in the news that Physics
has uncovered yet another layer of reality, may that be through smaller
and smaller subatomic particles, conventional largeness of the Universe,
time dimensions, string theory, etc, etc. Whenever that happens,
for a few seconds, one can understand the whole picture and feel part of it;
glimpsing in the imagination what the next frontier may be. Such glimpse can
challenge our very own nature of perception and 'liveability' (yes, I just
made that word up): Many people find it hard to escape the seemingly
rock-solid perception of this world - we seek comfort in KNOWING that what
and where we live is the begin and the end in itself. We take for granted
in KNOWING that reality is delivered to us as-is and continually deny the
possibility that it may be all a vicious cycle of self-assured illusion.
That happens in almost all of our knowledge mindsets: religion, society,
moral, science, etc.
That kind of 'un-mindsetting' poses us interesting existential questions:
Where do we begin, and end? Where are we? Who are we? WHAT are we?
One can easily fall into a spiral downfall by giving in to these questions.
I believe we begin and end when we want to. We define what we are.
It's everyone's responsibility to question our mindsets everyday, every
minute, and every second, guided by the never-ending thirst to know what
we are - and the uncertainty of it all.
We should constantly redefine ourselves as one entity.
In small steps for Man, but heage leaps for Mankind.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The image is very simple, it's entirely made of spheres and an area-light. 
I'd put a ZIP file with the source, but unfortunately, I mistakedly
deleted the sources (you wouldn't miss anything). I used Moray to place
the spheres where desired, and then in POV, tweaked the radiosity
settings (mostly according to the Radiosity Tutorial) to get good
results, and then added focal blur (the good ol' method).


EoF