EMAIL: rougier@loria.fr NAME: Nicolas Rougier TOPIC: Mystery COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The blob tree COUNTRY: France WEBPAGE: http://www.loria.fr/~rougier RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: mgrass/weeds macro, maketree macro, gimp for resizing RENDER TIME: ~ 12h00 HARDWARE USED: PIII 900Mhz, 256Mo RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Since the topic was mystery, I assumed that most people would try to produce dark and cold atmosperes so I decided to try to produce a very sunny picture that would nonetheless carry some mysteries that the viewer would discover in a given order. The first mystery is of course the presence of a beach ball in the desert that is examined by all these little blob creatures. Since they all focus on the ball, it somehow helps the viewer to first ask himself "what is this ball doing here ?". Then, I assumed the viewer would probably look at the details of the picture and suddenly realized that one blob creature is not looking at the ball at all but is looking at something out of the picture. This was intended to be the second mystery. Finally, I wanted the last and most evident mystery to be "discovered" in the end... Just have in mind that if you were to be in the desert in front of the same scene, I bet you would not pay much attention to the ball... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image is quite simple: - desert is a height field. - tree comes from the maketree macro (by Gilles Tran) - weeds comes from the weeds macro (by Jeremy Praay) (a modified version of the makegrass macro by Gilles Tran) - blob character is from me. Camera, tree and ball were placed using the trace macro as for the blob. For those last, trace was just a bit more complex because I wanted them to be "stable" on their branch so I checked the normal vector at point of intersection to be sure it was approximately aiming at the up direction (y) (I only include the final positions in the file). Focus of blob characters is computed automatically as part of the macro that I wrote.