EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr NAME: Miroslav Hundak TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Whirl COUNTRY: Croatia WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Texture View RENDER TIME: app. 23 hours HARDWARE USED: PII(450/100), 64MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Basically it's a water whirl in a small round pool under an alien sky. Simple, but kind of nice looking. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I had absolutely no idea about what to do for this round. No, actually the topic is so broad that I had too many ideas, so in the final despair I decided to use some of my modified test works for this image. I took one underwater ior test, added some unusualy colored sky (greenish with yellow horizont) and a few fancy details to the pool, including small area lights (12 of them), a few silver and gold crosses and a lava red bottom. To water I added a large vortex with some random-sized bubbles moving in a spiral. There's also a plastic ball sitting on the water surface just to show off the radiosity effect and to take the edge off of the seriousness of the whole image. Anyway, it's out of this world. Rendering was done with anti-aliasing threshold 0.2 in radiosity quality, and it took forever to render. About the original test rendering: I wanted to test the refraction capabilities of pov-ray renderer, and to see if it can simulate the "total reflection" effect, when a ray of light hits the surfuce from the denser side thus refracting to a bigger angle. When this angle becomes 90 degrees or more the total reflection occurs and the ray bounces of the surface instead of going along it (when it refracts to 90 degrees), thus acting as a mirror, blah, blah, blah. This effect is used in optical fibers and it can also be seen if you look from underwater to the surface. Appearantly it works.