TITLE: Band van Möbius fancy NAME: Knut Roll-Lund COUNTRY: Norway EMAIL: kr-lund@online.no WEBPAGE: http://home.online.no/kr-lund TOPIC: Insects and Spiders COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.1g TOOLS USED: Borland C, sPatch 1.5 RENDER TIME: 24m10s HARDWARE USED: PIII 450MHz 128MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Ants walking on a Moebius band, the funny shape with only one surface. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The models used was not especially made for the competition. It is my version of M.C. Escher's Band van Möbius II. It is not a copy as you might see, if you put the images side by side. The differences are intentional. The band is created by a C program. I created the C program specifically for this purpose. The band in itself is actually a circle with a half twist and wobbeling. The wobbeling is what makes the figure 8 when viewed from the side. My band turns evenly. To make an Escher clone the turn must vary. The result is that the ant on the top is behind the band. The ants are drawn in sPatch, and are based on Escher's ants. I first drew one standing on a flat surface. Since the band is curving in quite a nasty way each of the 9 ants had to be fitted manually to its specific place, 9 ants times 6 legs and the curving of the back. It was a horrible amount of hours put into that. The lighting is a bit sharp, this helps to give back some of depth lost in the tele-lens. I was tempted to give the ants a coloring like normal forest ants here in Norway, but fell back to the more original red. The background had to be a sky but it reflected in the ants eyes. To remedy this I blocked out the sky except where it can be seen. (Did you know that Earth is the planet of the ants. Even the estimated weight of all ants is larger that the estimated weigth of all humans.)