TITLE: Universa ut ludo
NAME: David Fam_
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: davidfama@supereva.it
WEBPAGE: not yet
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: un_ut_do.jpg
ZIPFILE: un_ut_do.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov - Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    Pov - Ray and Photo Impression 4 (for the alias name Unifex
Espiante)

RENDER TIME: 
    0d 7h 58m

HARDWARE USED: 
    2.66 GHz - 512 Mb DDRam

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

My idea for the topic was to interpret it literally. Surrealism: everything
above reality...and then I thought that the only thing above the human reality
is the reality for a race of Gods (Gods for our point of view), or maybe only
an alien race above our concept of reality.
I tried to give an image of our solar system in a water universe, with an
"Alien" who is playing/creating a new planet/star.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This is my very first image ever done...and I work on it for 20 h in total after
a reading to the beginners tutorial  that I download (2 week ago) with povray
renderer. I tried to use almost everything explained in the tutorial since this
has to be a kind of abstract of what I understood of povray.

However:
-> the sky is a simple sky-sphere with a color-map.
-> the planets are solid geometry with CSGs.
-> the borning planet is an isosurface.
-> the sea is an isosurface merged with a plane.
-> the sheets of paper are bicubic-patches.
-> the hand is made with blobs and solid geometry.
-> the nebulosa is made with media.

I used an isosurface for the sea to provide some waves around the planets: this
waves are sin-waves with a gaussian slope.

Also the borning planet is made with an isosurface because I tried to give the
impression that the cristal ball is retracting from the hand of the alien while
he/she/it is creating the planet inside the ball. 

The hand of the Alien is hollow because I wanted to fill it with the same
"material" of the nebulosa. The Nails are coloured with image-maps of various
deep-skyes...a reflection of the Universe.

Problems:

I had some unsolved problems with several objects of my scene. First of all, the
borning planet seems to be coloured with a map and not filled with a
media...and this brings to an enormous error like the fact that the hole reveal
the sphere as empty and not filled with the nebula, as I wish. I tried to
enclose the nebula in a sphere pigmented with "Clear", and it worked out, but
the reflections made the sphere visible and I don't like it at all.

The second big problem is the hand: it is too simple, it has no particolars, and
there is a problem in the position of one nail.

I could not work a lot on this problems and on others, but the result is not so
catastrofic...so I decide to submit this image...in particular to take some
advantages from your critics...hoping also in some little tips...

