EMAIL: mztyree@sedona.net NAME: Michael Z. Tyree TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: STARPOOL COUNTRY: United States of AMERICA WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Facility/4079/ RENDERER USED: Povray for Windows TOOLS USED: CorelDraw, Photopaint RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: Pentium 350, 128MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a planet orbiting a star in the Whirlpool Nebula. The Starpool is a portal to other worlds. When one becomes bored of the cold geometric world, they can enter the portal and be transported to a warm organic planet located in a globular cluster of the Milky Way Galaxy. Or any of dozens of other worlds. The small city in the distance is Diaspar, named after a city in an Arthur C. Clarke novel. The girl is bringing a LightGlobe as she prepares to visit a far away planet called Earth. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Many of the geometric shapes were laid out in CorelDraw and coordinates taken. The portal in particular needed precise coordinates for the circles and boxes of which it is composed. Also the flagstone-like tiles were plotted in CorelDraw and rotated to create the floor around the pool. The pool and its ascending column of liquid were the most difficult to create. I tried to make it match at the pool level and turn more transparent as it reached the level of the Egg. It also needed vertical ripples in contrast to the circular ripples in the pool. I don't know if I succeeded at that . . . The stars were from a photo taken off the internet at the Space Telescope Science Institute Home Page and manipulated a bit in Corel PhotoPaint. The tree shadow is just a line art silhouette of a tree with the background transparent. The girl on the left was from a scanned-in photograph I took of my daughter. I painted the background blue using Corel Photopaint and made that color index transparent in the rendering. The gold pointed star shapes are small stellated dodecahedrons with a cutout to make them hollow. They were fairly easy to make using the math describing a dodecahedron in the "shapes2.inc" file that comes with PovRay. The rest of the scene is pretty standard CSG and texturing. I would have liked to have spent longer refining the details and adding decoration. Someday . . .