TITLE: Solitary Spider
NAME: Kerry Tyler
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: ktyler01@attbi.com
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.5
TOOLS USED: converted to .jpg with Paint Shop Pro
RENDER TIME: 20 hours 11 minutes 
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 1GHZ
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Yes, it's creepy (I greatly dislike spiders), but I have always had a fascination with how or what other creatures might think or feel.  Even the lowly arachnid seems to me as though it must be lonely, waiting motionless in the solitude of its tiny world, aware of only what occurs in its web.  Of course the Moon, in all of its splendid grandeur, is far too removed to find a suitable companion.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I discovered the current competition's topic of loneliness only two weeks before the submission deadline.  It is my first submission to the competition as it is the first time that a topic has jumped out at me with an obvious answer that I thought I could work with.  The idea came to me right away, and I began numerous experiment with basic stand-in shapes to find the exact composition that achieved the effect that I was looking for.
I had long ago created a basic spider object which I had to eventually modify, but which worked well as a stand-in and which is probably the original inspiration for this image.  I am quite pleased with the resulting play of light and dark, and with the apparent uncluttered simpleness of the image.

My greatest challenge was in learning to program POV-Ray to generate the web object with a great deal of random variability, to look natural rather than mechanical.

A rather simple image, it still took 20+ hours to render due to the thin webbing and the super samples needed to calculate them.

Viewed best in a darkened room, the image has a different feel depending on how far away the viewer is from the image.  Hopefully the composition of light and dark draws the viewer in for a closer look, revealing detail which further ensnares the victim so that the spider will not appear so lonely!