EMAIL: keayers@columbus.rr.com NAME: Ken Ayers TOPIC: Surrealism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Sky Loft COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://home.columbus.rr.com/keayers/index.html RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g TOOLS USED:Corel PhotoPaint (Conversion to JPEG) RENDER TIME: 281 seconds HARDWARE USED: HP Pavilion, 1.0 GHz AMD Athlon, 256Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Location, location, location ... What real estate agent wouldn't die to list a nice little loft with this view! "Sky Loft" was inspired by my desire to escape the tiny, one-bedroom apartment I lived in at the time. So, I thought: "If I'm going to escape, why not do it in grand style!" Besides the obvious paradox, notice that the corner window looks out onto a nighttime sky. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Parts of "Sky Loft" had their beginnings back in POV-Ray Version 2.1 (I think it was). At that time, without the benefit of the control directives - especially #while loops, I wrote C-programs, which generated include files, for things that repeated ... like the spiral staircase and the glass sculpture, here. Other than that, everything is pretty much straight CSG. Finally, since I'm a programmer by profession, you'll probably notice a good bit of programming structure in the accompanying source files. My "big thing" is to define a few key values, up front, and make as many other object parameters as possible be derived from those few values. This allows me to make sweeping changes in the scene, simply by changing a few key variables. This general rule, which is also a very good rule in writing computer programs, has led me to develop a fairly sophisticated technique for managing POV-Ray's animation clock, when doing animations. If you're interested, check out the "POV-Ray Animation Tutorial" on my website.