TITLE: The Aquarium NAME: Windell H. Oskay COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: windell@oskay.net TOPIC: Catastrophe COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray, GraphicConverter (conversion of final image to JPG only) RENDER TIME: ~16 hours HARDWARE USED: Linux box IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A happy little goldfish swims in its lovely aquarium on a sunny day. What could possibly go wrong? DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This scene was made entirely in POV-Ray, comprising about 1500 lines. I've include the source, which is heavily commented. Most of the "interesting" modeling is done with isosurface objects and sphere sweeps. The blender consists of several distinct elements. The glass pitcher is made with an isosurface object for the exterior, merged with a sphere-sweep handle, with a set of spheres subtracted to form the interior. The goldfish is made of sphere sweeps. The lid is made of superellipsoids, with a cylinder through the center to represent the top cap. The screw-on base of the pitcher is made with a pair of lathe objects, one for the chrome interior, one for the white structure that supports the blades. The beehive-shaped lower part of the blender is an isosurface object. The labels, both on the blender and on the can of fish food, are image maps made in POV-Ray. I've included the .pov files to generate those maps in the .zip archive. The cord of the blender is a hand-crafted sphere sweep object. The room that we are looking at is fully modeled, and has six walls. The windowframe is modeled with simple boxes. The countertop and windowsill are superellipsoids. The distribution of spilled fish flakes on the countertop is taken from a function describing the distribution of rocks on the ground in the isocacti.pov sample file. There are also some interesting objects out of view to make good reflections. Off in the distance, there is grass, along with a bush and tree, the latter two being made of isosurfaces. The window is rendered with a rather heavy normal to help suggest distance. Focal blur is also used to help suggest distance, and to draw the eye of the viewer away from the trees and towards the fish. The scene is rendered with two light sources and heavy radiosity, to suggest the intensity of the sunbeam coming through the window. The sunlight is an area light to give the soft shadow on the countertop, and a second, fill light is used indoors to improve the contrast of the final scene, providing shadows for depth cues on the windowsill, blender and fish food can. Photon mapping is employed chiefly to provide interesting caustics on the fish. Unfortunately, between focal blur, radiosity, and photons, render time becomes a factor.