TITLE: Sphere
NAME: Bernard Hatt
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: bmh@arkady.demon.co.uk
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: image.jpg
ZIPFILE: image.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.6.1

TOOLS USED: 
    MicroEMACS, pngtopnm, cjpeg, RCS, Linux (Slackware)

RENDER TIME: 
    8h

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 2500

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Too many people just construct a reflective sphere on a checkered plane
without bothering to check if the plane has sufficent foundations to
take the weight, this is what can happen ....


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Most of the scene was created with CSG,  the pieces of the broken plane
are made from an intersection of 3 height fields.

The main sphere is constructed from the difference of two spheres
(inside and outside) intersected with a wedge (vertical) and cylinder
(horizontal), I put a bounded_by on the 'sphere bricks' to
improve rendering time.

I was trying to create a ceramic tile look to the checkered
plane with an average of the bozo and quilted normal patterns.

Getting the plane to look good was more tricky than expected,
as there were aliasing artifacts near the horizon, even with
Antialias_Threshold=0.0, my solution was to us a pattern for
the plane which faded with distance (from the origin) which
also deals with the darkening towards the horizon, and to use
focal blur.

The pieces of broken plane are all triangular and defined by
an arrays of points for the corners, patterns for the edge
(so that adjacent peices match), and a rotation and
translation for their position.

Most of the complete spheres in the background and the sphere
segments are randomly placed, with a few extra ones added
where I thought it needed it.