TITLE: Surreal Art
NAME: Jaan Pullerits
COUNTRY: Estonia
EMAIL: jaan@surnuaed.ee
WEBPAGE: http://www.surnuaed.ee/ud
TOPIC: Surreal
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jp_surr.jpg
ZIPFILE: jp_surr.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 

        VIM 6.1 
        GNU Make
        GIMP (for imagemaps, brightness/contrast adjustion and copyright)
        Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r0 Woody

RENDER TIME: 
    ca 8 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    960MHz Celeron (I think)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


...I like to travel in time and space, close my eyes and take long journies
to distant galaxies far away, and long time in future or past. I don't know
where I got this time, but it was something I hadn't seen before. Usually I
see planets covered with sands, some weird foliage. Maybe even cities with
weirdest life forms, and basic structure, but this time...

  First thing that cut into my ears was silence. Something one wouldn't
expect from a big city like that... After a while I started hearing silent
sounds made by different things. I heard some sort of electric humming from
distance. A small breeze in the weird foresty kind of thing in background.
Even the lights around the strange statue I was standing in front of were
buzzing monotonously while they slowly and fluidly moved in seemingly random
patterns. This and the tentacle like plants were only thing that were
moving. Although there seemed to be many round windows on the houses that
were casting bright white light, none of them showed any movement. None of
them ever went out or came on...

  I took a long breath. The air was clean. Cleaner than I have ever felt,
it was pure, tasteless... How could this be?

Where were I? What was behind these windows? Why was everything so quiet,
so clean? And what was this statue supposed to mean? Was it a creature of
that world? A good looking female maybe? Or some ancient warlord? Maybe it
is some sort of god of locals. Or maybe it's just another surreal piece of 
art...

  I felt I was being pulled back. I didn't want to go. There were so many
things I wanted to see and look first... But it was inevitable, my reality
wanted me back... I opened my eyes, I was still on my bed. It was
impossible to find this place again, so all those mysteries left there
remain unsolved. It was fact I had accept, but it still hasn't let me go.
If I could only take another peek at this strange looking world...



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  This image was written entirely in VIM, no modellers have been used. It's
actually a bunch of #macros and #while loops. The statue itself is an
experiment with blobs with about hundred elements with various strenghts.
Most of other things are simple or less simple CSG's built with #while
loops. For example the christmastree kind of buildings. Or the boxed
skycrapers.

  The weird plantlife is a (cubic spline) sphere sweep. I just wanted to try
it out, to see how it works. I think it's pretty nice thingy, and I am sure
I am going to use it in future aswell. (PovLab had B-Splines what were very
close to sphere_sweep, but didn't look nearly as good.)

  Lights are made with emitting media, but they have arealights inside, 
(Has anyone ever thought about adding spherical arealights to POV-Ray?) so
they cast some shadow aswell.

  Floor is made of checker (no, I think it's cool) pattern of two different
imagemaps. I created them with GIMP. Yeah, it's plane.

  Sky is a huge sphere with texture applied. Like one could imagine.


THANKS TO:

  Kristo for providing some of his computer time for the rendering the
image. On my own i586 I aproximated the time to render the image to about 3
days. On his computer it took only 8 hours. Thanks dude!

