TITLE: Fantastic Voyage
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmvoyage.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmvoyage.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (jpeg conversion)
            Paper, pencil, ruler.

RENDER TIME: 34 hours, 34 minutes, 57 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


On a voyage through the final frontier, a tourist submarine, shrunk
to cellular size, takes its passengers on a tour inside the human
body. The novel and film in which this idea was developed were titled
"Fantastic Voyage", an apt description. A synonym for "Fantastic" in
this context is, of course, "Unbelievable".

Here we see the submarine on a journey through the bloodstream of a
human host. Suspended in the watery plasma are myriad red blood cells,
carrying oxygen from the lungs to other parts of the body, and a few
of the bigger white blood cells. Guardians of the body, the white
cells move independently by extending pseudopods, seeking out and
attacking any foreign substances. One is chasing the submarine and
almost has a grip on the wing fin, but deft work by the pilot should
see another group of tourists safely home.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This whole scene is inside a hollow POV-Ray blob object, which forms
the blood vessel walls in the background. Various blob components are
both added and subtracted to form a smooth organic shape with
connecting vessels and tubes.

The submarine is a CSG object made entirely of superellipsoids, with
other shapes subtracted to make the viewport and portholes. These are
filled with a thin screen of yellowish glass, and some interior lights
provide the window glow. The paintwork is a simple colour_map (I didn't
have time to do an image_map!) and layered over it is a bozo map to
represent dirt or other stains.

The red blood cells are fairly simple blobs, with sphere components
spun along a sinusoidal circle. The centre is filled with a flat
sphere, and two spheres are subtracted to make the dimples. The cells
are created by a macro call, which I looped with random numbers for the
placement, adjusting until it looked right and there were no object
intersections.

The white blood cells are semi-random blobs made of a number of
unevenly scaled spheres. The translucent texture allows you to see
some more solid blobs inside which represent the cellular nucleus and
other components. I gave the white cells a refractive index only
slightly higher than 1, to simulate an index a little higher than the
plasma in which they are floating. This way I didn't have to give the
whole interior of the background blob a refractive index.

The entire scene is, however, filled with a weakly scattering medium,
to show the spotlight beam and provide the ambience of being inside a
liquid. I always seem to make scenes that require lots of media, which
seems to push the render time up by a factor of 5 to 10. :-(

There are only five light sources in this scene: The spotlight, two
lights inside the submarine to provide the glowing windows, and two
shadowless fill lights, which were dimmed down to make the whole scene
gloomy like you'd expect inside a human body.

Zip file contains full source, and if you have a 500MHz machine you
might even be able to render this scene in under a day!

