EMAIL: delfeld@lycos.com NAME: Neal Delfeld TOPIC: Frozen Moment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Shell X-Ray COUNTRY: US WEBPAGE: - RENDERER USED: Povray TOOLS USED: XnView (http://www.xnview.com) RENDER TIME: ~30 minutes HARDWARE USED: amd 1400, 256mb ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The x-ray of a fictional shell. Please reference Bert Myers' actual shell x-rays for where I got the idea. X-ray's are generally not thought of in terms of captured moments, but – like all photos and such truck – are. The idea of a singular moment is actually used in such things as cat-scans, when a representation of a current state of the brain is sought. That particular techonology is used to help understand the state of a person's brain before and after a certain event, such as the brain state of a paranoiac before and after a drug treatment, with the snapshot moments before and after 'proving' that an actual change in a person occrurred (though the practice seems more like phrenology than medical evidence). Gimp converted the image to JPEG, and did final image sizing (from DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Tried to use the "sphere sweep", but it left much to be desired in terms of control of sphere radius and number of spheres used. Instead, I placed individual spheres through macros which imitate the sphere sweep. The spheres were placed along a sine wave variation, then duplicated, rotating the wave about a radius while increasing the scale. This will make a basic shell. Through various variables, the shell will seem more and more realistic. The whole scene is comprised of variations on the sine wave – height delta, height placement delta, spiral delta, number of spheres delta, number of slices delta, and probably some I don't remember. The x-ray effect is actually very similar to a real x-ray. The spheres were made mostly filtering (i.e., rgbf <1,1,1,.9>) and then the object used the "no_image" command. When a plane is placed perpendicular to the camera veiwing line, and a light source is placed along the camera viewing line, and the image is between the light source and the plane, the shadow will imitate what happens during an actual x-ray. Tips: Make the light source parallel. Make two versions of the shape – one with few spheres, and one for final rendering. Viewing and adjusting the outline of one shell slice is easier than veiwng and adjusting the final shell. Be prepared for using over 20 thousands spheres to make a smooth final shell. One image had over 100K spheres, and took more time than I was willing to wait to render. There is no need for a constant number of spheres in each slice of the shell. The inner (smaller) shell rotations do not need many spheres, while the outer rotations will demand a lot for smoothness. If a shell is not going to be transparent, only the last 540 degrees of rotation (360 + 180, or 1 ½ turns) will probably be necessary.