EMAIL: (only use lowercase) timISNOTnikias@gmx.netWARE NAME: Tim Nikias Wenclawiak TOPIC: Out of Place COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Lost in Geometric Space COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: www.NoLights.de RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows, Silo, PSP7 (for the Author's text) RENDER TIME: 2h13m28s HARDWARE USED: 2.4GHz Athlon XP, 768 MB RAM, Win2000 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A small, red furry fellow is lost in geometric black&white space and feels quite out of place... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was done rather quick. First, I scripted a small macro which would create a beveled box. Then, I used two loops to spread 15.000 large boxes and 5.500 small ones. The large boxes receive a randomly scaled and rotated checker pattern with differing shades of grey, whereas the small boxes are just plain white. The beveled edge is always black. The plane uses a simple hexagon-pattern and a low-value reflection. The background is a sky-sphere which fades from rgb .6 at the horizon to rgb 2 at the top of the skysphere. I've also added a black fog for artistic effect. The lightsources are all just shades of grey and thus, I get a black and white image, very straightforward. As for the red furry fellow, there was quite some more work involved. I modelled the mesh using Silo, which is a subdivision surface modeller my purse could afford. Then, on the main body, I sample the surface using my Surcoat-Macros (which gather samples more efficiently than simply using brute-force and bombarding the object with trace-calls). The samples are then converted to hairs using me recently released Surcoat2Hair-Macros. And that's basically it. Tweak the camera and the lights' positions till I found them satisfying, and I was done! I loaded the image into PSP7 to add the author's signature to the bottom right corner. I didn't include the source for the Furry Fellow, because the mesh is quite large, so I've replaced it with a red sphere (without hairs, BTW, as that would be 13MB data). Final note: I used POV-Ray 3.5 instead of the most current release, because 3.6.x at the time of making this image has a bug with macros using "return by reference" procedures. Those that don't know what this means don't have to worry and should stick to the latest release. :-) In case of questions, feel free to email me! :o) Regards, Tim