EMAIL: samuel@boxtop.com NAME: Samuel J. Goldstein TOPIC: Glass TITLE: Heart of Glass COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.commwerks.com/~libelle (temporary) RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.01 TOOLS USED: Fractal Design Poser 2, DXF2POV RENDER TIME: 05:08:10 HARDWARE USED: Sun, dual 168MHz UltraSPARC, 128M memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Ah, February. The month when Valentine's Day whips the card-sellers into a frenzy. The month my girlfriend told me that if I spent another evening rendering pictures, she'd leave me for good (just kidding). What else could I create, but a picture of a relationship postmortem: a view of the Heart of Glass. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The heart polynomial was taken directly from a scene done by Tore Nordstrand (tore@maxwell.fi.uib.no) that (I believe) was on the POV-Ray CDROM. The cracks are formed by doing CSG with a height-field, which comes from a hand-drawn GIF. Although it's not highly evident in the image, the breakage of the heart has a cone "popped" out of the back, not unlike what a BB does to a glass window. This, too, was simple CSG. The 3D depressed guy was created in Poser, exported as a DXF, and converted using DXF2POV (the 2D depressed guy was a frame-grab I did back in the days I had long hair). The landscape was created by rendering a quick POV-Ray texture/lighting scene, and using it as a height-field. I didn't have time to add a recursive cactus-grower to populate the desert. I tried rendering this on my Mac (120MHz 604/80M), but after three days I gave up. I got a co-worker with a fast Sun system to install POV-Ray, and rendered it in a paltry 5 hours. This was my first POV-Ray picture in quite a while. I don't have as much time any more to create scenes without a modeller, and we poor Mac-using stepchildren don't have much in the way of tools that are POV-Ray compatible. It was a mixed experience: the power of POV-Ray is exceptional; the ability to create awesome skies and landscapes is great. But there were frustrations as well -- the error in the root solver (the horizontal crack across the heart is an error), and the fact that you can't declare a polygon mesh to be solid (or use them in CSG). ___Samuel___