EMAIL: hobbes-kuscheltiger@gmx.at
NAME: Florian Siegmund
TOPIC: Mystery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Blue Light
COUNTRY: Austria
WEBPAGE: none
RENDERER USED: MegaPov v1.0
TOOLS USED: FotoCanvas 2.0 to convert the image to jpeg and to change its contrast and brightness
RENDER TIME: about 20 hours
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 700 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
There is a story about a blue light down in a well... a brave young soldier falls into this well, finds the light and discovers that every time he lights his pipe on it, a little black manikin appears and awaits his instructions. Besides the fact that the light is blue, another mysterious thing is that it never extinguishes. The soldier has been betrayed by the king some time before, because he has been the bravest man in the army, and the king has made a promise to espouse the bravest soldier with his doughter, the princess; but the man has only been a farmer's son, so the king has broken his promise. With the blue light in his hands, the soldier gets the chance to take revenge, and at the end of the story he marries the princess after all.
In the image you can see the blue light lying at the bottom of the well. It is nighttime (maybe full moon), so there is a good contrast to the rest of the image - and that is what makes it look cryptic.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
At the beginning, I used very simple geometric forms to compose the image (for example a tube with a certain thickness for the well). Later I replaced them with isosurfaces, rounded boxes and cylinders (the wooden parts) and so on. I like to use random and loops in my images, that makes it very easy to let them look natural. The lawn, for example, looks very complex, but it is a single declared triangle mesh shape, scaled and rotated randomly to form a bunch, scaled and rotated another time by random factors, declared as a bunch and put on several random locations :)