EMAIL: NAME: Jaan Pullerits TOPIC: Surreal COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Surreal Art COUNTRY: Estonia WEBPAGE: http://www.surnuaed.ee/ud RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows TOOLS USED: VIM 6.1 GNU Make GIMP (for imagemaps, brightness/contrast adjustion and copyright) Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r0 Woody RENDER TIME: ca 8 hours HARDWARE USED: 960MHz Celeron (I think) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: ...I like to travel in time and space, close my eyes and take long journies to distant galaxies far away, and long time in future or past. I don't know where I got this time, but it was something I hadn't seen before. Usually I see planets covered with sands, some weird foliage. Maybe even cities with weirdest life forms, and basic structure, but this time... First thing that cut into my ears was silence. Something one wouldn't expect from a big city like that... After a while I started hearing silent sounds made by different things. I heard some sort of electric humming from distance. A small breeze in the weird foresty kind of thing in background. Even the lights around the strange statue I was standing in front of were buzzing monotonously while they slowly and fluidly moved in seemingly random patterns. This and the tentacle like plants were only thing that were moving. Although there seemed to be many round windows on the houses that were casting bright white light, none of them showed any movement. None of them ever went out or came on... I took a long breath. The air was clean. Cleaner than I have ever felt, it was pure, tasteless... How could this be? Where were I? What was behind these windows? Why was everything so quiet, so clean? And what was this statue supposed to mean? Was it a creature of that world? A good looking female maybe? Or some ancient warlord? Maybe it is some sort of god of locals. Or maybe it's just another surreal piece of art... I felt I was being pulled back. I didn't want to go. There were so many things I wanted to see and look first... But it was inevitable, my reality wanted me back... I opened my eyes, I was still on my bed. It was impossible to find this place again, so all those mysteries left there remain unsolved. It was fact I had accept, but it still hasn't let me go. If I could only take another peek at this strange looking world... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image was written entirely in VIM, no modellers have been used. It's actually a bunch of #macros and #while loops. The statue itself is an experiment with blobs with about hundred elements with various strenghts. Most of other things are simple or less simple CSG's built with #while loops. For example the christmastree kind of buildings. Or the boxed skycrapers. The weird plantlife is a (cubic spline) sphere sweep. I just wanted to try it out, to see how it works. I think it's pretty nice thingy, and I am sure I am going to use it in future aswell. (PovLab had B-Splines what were very close to sphere_sweep, but didn't look nearly as good.) Lights are made with emitting media, but they have arealights inside, (Has anyone ever thought about adding spherical arealights to POV-Ray?) so they cast some shadow aswell. Floor is made of checker (no, I think it's cool) pattern of two different imagemaps. I created them with GIMP. Yeah, it's plane. Sky is a huge sphere with texture applied. Like one could imagine. THANKS TO: Kristo for providing some of his computer time for the rendering the image. On my own i586 I aproximated the time to render the image to about 3 days. On his computer it took only 8 hours. Thanks dude!