TITLE: Lost in Geometric Space
NAME: Tim Nikias Wenclawiak
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: (only use lowercase) timISNOTnikias@gmx.netWARE
WEBPAGE: www.NoLights.de
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tnw_lost.jpg
ZIPFILE: tnw_lost.zip
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