3D Ray Tracing: POV-Ray
For a number of years I entered the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC) hosted by the POV-Ray team but open to any rendering engines. Here are showcased my entries and I a custom modification I did to POV-Ray itself allowing for algorithmic surface distortions.
Click on the links for pages that I put up not long after the contests. They're ugly and I haven't done anything to pretty them up or edit them, but they're pretty informative about the processes I went through.
Aaaah Sunlight This was the first image I did for the IRTC and I spent a ton of time on it, particularly getting the righ effect of sunlight going through stained glass.
In the end it was taking far too long to render and I had to enter a cut down version to contest which didn't show well. I still really like it though.
Basking My second entry and my best placer, coming in 11th out of 79 entries. Another excuse to use stained glass, yet once again I ran out of time and had to enter a smaller, non anti-aliased version of the image. I feel I could have
cracked the top 5 if I'd given it the time it deserved. My favorite image.
Where Are They I wasn't going to enter this contest, but then a great idea came to me with about a week left. I think it's pretty good considering the rush. Do you sense a theme here, I seem to be always crunched for time on these.
Aiii This projects was to be a showcase for my custom modification of POVRay listed on the Code Projects page. The sphere in the center of the picture was to be a horse, surface distorted and textured so it would look like a metal horse jumping out of a marble one. As usual I started running out of time
and my plans to optimize the custom distortion code turned out to be rather optimistic. I eventually had to cut the horse and I replaced it in the 11th hour with something that didn't really work, a green isosurface sphere with a crackle pattern applied to it. Why I didn't use the statue of the woman from Basking I still don't know, it would have looked like she was standing protectively over the boy with nice water ripples from the fountain washing over her. Ah hindsight.
But there are other things I really like about this image, like the water fountains, the scattering of leaves and the way it all comes together, almost.