EMAIL: bleecker@math.hawaii.edu NAME: David Bleecker TOPIC: Glass COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Diffraction Distraction RENDERER USED: TrueSpace2 TOOLS USED: Mathematica & Diffract (see below) RENDER TIME: 1h 17m HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A spherical glass ball rests upon a glass podium with a smooth surface which has dodecahedral symmetry (to my knowledge, it is the first SMOOTH surface with this symmetry ever to be rendered). The podium has a glass base which is an extruded and beveled Reuleaux triangle (a triangle with curved sides which has constant width). The base rests on a rug which is adorned with diffraction patterns. The left wall has a shiny, bumpy wallpaper pattern. It is punctuated by a window with finely rippled surface which one usually finds in bathrooms. The familiar diffraction pattern in the window is presumably caused by a bright light in the dark outside. The other wall has a darker stonelike pattern, which is intended to accentuate the stained glass window gloriously lit, irrational as it may be, by the early morning sun. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: It was probably not such a great idea to use TrueSpace2 to raytrace a scene which could have been done using only POV, especially for a competition sponsored by POV. However, I was pressed for time, and experimentation with the placement of lights and objects is faster with TrueSpace2. Incidentally, TrueSpace2 is fairly cheap now. I bought the SE version for about $100, and upgraded to TrueSpace2 for $170. There may be some things that POV can do (especially all those things for which the documentation is yet to be written) that TrueSpace can't, but I haven't found many of significance to me. I wrote a Mathematica 3.0 notebook which generates 3D parametric surfaces and exports them to *.cob files (the objects in TrueSpace2). With a Pentium 166, I can smoothly rotate and transform TEXTURED versions these surfaces in REAL-TIME in TrueSpace2, and this has been very useful to me as a differential geometer. The dodecahedral surface of the podium was generated by an algorithm I devised in Mathematica (not cheap, but I need it in my work) and exported to TrueSpace2 using the aforementioned notebook I wrote. It has 4096 vertices. All of the texture maps (the wall paper, stone wall, rug, diffraction pattern in the window, the stained glass window) were generated by a single Windows95 (only) freeware program "Diffract" which I wrote with Microsoft Visual C++ 4. It essentially produces a wide variety of colorful intricate diffraction patterns depending on numbers that the user inputs. It is freely available (and not crippled in any way) at the NoNags site under "Graphics Tools (32 bit)" . NoNags gave it a rating of 5.5 rubber ducks out of a possible 6. Diffract only runs under Windows95 (well, probably NT too). One can simultaneously use texture maps as bump maps to produce effects such as the raised patterns as in the wallpaper of the left wall or for the stone pattern on the right. The scene file "dbdiffra.scn", all of the texture maps, and a separate object file "icos3.cob" for the smooth dodecahedral surface are in the zip file "dbdiffra.zip".