EMAIL: sedi@geocities.com NAME: Darren Izzard (SeDi) TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Infinite Worlds COUNTRY: UK WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/4156 RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1a (MS-DOS) TOOLS USED: sPatch, Leveller, POV-Ray 3.1 Superpatch (Win95), Paint Shop Pro 4 RENDER TIME: 4hrs 41mins 36secs HARDWARE USED: 133MHz Pentium, 38Mb IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A vision of just some of the infinite number of worlds emerging from the human imagination (or, perhaps, my somewhat limited imagination!). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The mountains and ice-world heightfields were made using Leveller. The face-mask, fish and water-weed objects were made using sPatch. The "whirlpool" emerging from the top of the face is made of rotated rings of spheres differing in size (they get smaller the further to the left and right of the image). The liquidy texture is a bozo pigment with a high-turbulence onion normal. I developed most of the scene in Superpatch, but the whirlpool seemed to crash POV-Ray under certain circumstances (the key seemed to be the combination of a certain blue light and the whirlpool). So I tried rendering the scene using the official MS-DOS POV-Ray 3.1a, and that worked fine. The two planets are generated by a macro I wrote, with lots of parameters! Basically they're each made of two concentric spheres, with some quite complicated textures. (The outer sphere supplies the cloud layer, with the inner sphere (land and ocean) showing through.) Because there are a number of different "sets" in this scene, each with slightly different lighting, preventing light from one set interfering with another was a problem. There are a number of concealed walls (hidden behind other objects) which I've used to prevent light from spilling between the ice-world and mountain-world sets, and into/out of the cityscape set. The ring at the top of the face is a similar device, stopping light from the whirlpool set shining on the back of the face mask. In contrast, some of the objects (namely the fish, water-weed and the pillars and beams on top of the wall) have no_shadow set, to prevent other lighting problems and unwanted shadows. Long-time IRTC'ers with a good memory may recognise the smiling star object, which is based on the one I created for my "Night Vision" picture in the "Night" round of the IRTC last year. The starfield behind the planets and mountains is a modified version of the "Starfield" texture from the standard POV-Ray "textures.inc" file. nb. The computer monitor in the lower-right of the image is displaying my "Elements" IRTC entry, also from last year - yet another Imaginary World. (The title/byline text in the top-left corner was added using Paint Shop Pro 4.) ---