TITLE: A Tabletop Aquarium
NAME: Ken Mortimer
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: KMortimer@cybec.com.au
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kmwater.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for Windows

RENDER TIME: 
    18 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pencil and Paper and a Pentium II 400, 128MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A Tabletop Aquarium...of sorts, with erm...fish in drinking
water.

I just thought I'd blur the line between two uses for water.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All hand-coded in POV-Ray.
All boring old CSG.

This is the first image I've created with POV-Ray in about
two years - my old PC couldn't keep up with my imagination,
but now I've got a new one :)

I must admit that I got into this round a little late (early
October) and that there's a lot more that I'd like to do
with this image. 

My initial idea for 'water' involved a tall glass of ice 
water next to a swimming pool, with the ocean and rain in 
the background. I created the glass of water first and 
somehow got hooked on making it as realistic as possible and
forgot about the rest of the scene. Soon, however, I decided
I couldn't be bothered with realism and found surrealism far
more exciting (who wants to model the real world when 
everything else is possible?).

I can't explain how fish got into the picture but soon the 
whole image revolved around them.

The source code is a bit of a rushed mess (my efforts to 
defy the constraints of time proved fruitless) but I promise
I will upload it to my web site once I'm happy with the 
image.

I initially used lathes for the glass and bottle but found 
them too slow so I used CSG instead. I regret that now :( 
Finding and getting rid of the strange reflection & 
refraction artifacts in the bottle took far too long.

The wire for the bottle stopper is a completely unmodifiable
embarrassing hack (constraints of time etc. etc.).

The fish are all identical. Unfortunately I didn't have time
to add some uniqueness to them.

The Treasure Chest, Clam, and Seaweed are *supposed* to look
like plastic aquarium decorations so I'm happy to leave them
as they are.

Please don't ask me how many methods I implemented to 
construct the piles of pebbles before ditching them all and 
resorting to hand-coding a multitude of scaled spheres :(

Many thanks to everyone who commented on the image as it 
developed.





