TITLE: A Tabletop Aquarium NAME: Ken Mortimer COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: KMortimer@cybec.com.au TOPIC: Water COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows RENDER TIME: 18 hours HARDWARE USED: Pencil and Paper and a Pentium II 400, 128MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A Tabletop Aquarium...of sorts, with erm...fish in drinking water. I just thought I'd blur the line between two uses for water. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All hand-coded in POV-Ray. All boring old CSG. This is the first image I've created with POV-Ray in about two years - my old PC couldn't keep up with my imagination, but now I've got a new one :) I must admit that I got into this round a little late (early October) and that there's a lot more that I'd like to do with this image. My initial idea for 'water' involved a tall glass of ice water next to a swimming pool, with the ocean and rain in the background. I created the glass of water first and somehow got hooked on making it as realistic as possible and forgot about the rest of the scene. Soon, however, I decided I couldn't be bothered with realism and found surrealism far more exciting (who wants to model the real world when everything else is possible?). I can't explain how fish got into the picture but soon the whole image revolved around them. The source code is a bit of a rushed mess (my efforts to defy the constraints of time proved fruitless) but I promise I will upload it to my web site once I'm happy with the image. I initially used lathes for the glass and bottle but found them too slow so I used CSG instead. I regret that now :( Finding and getting rid of the strange reflection & refraction artifacts in the bottle took far too long. The wire for the bottle stopper is a completely unmodifiable embarrassing hack (constraints of time etc. etc.). The fish are all identical. Unfortunately I didn't have time to add some uniqueness to them. The Treasure Chest, Clam, and Seaweed are *supposed* to look like plastic aquarium decorations so I'm happy to leave them as they are. Please don't ask me how many methods I implemented to construct the piles of pebbles before ditching them all and resorting to hand-coding a multitude of scaled spheres :( Many thanks to everyone who commented on the image as it developed.