TITLE: A study of the super ellipsoid and photon
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: photons2.jpg
ZIPFILE: photons2.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray 3.6.1
        

TOOLS USED: 


        povray editor
        Irfanview (to resize & convert to jpg)
        

HARDWARE USED: 


        Athlon XP 3200+ 2.22GHz 1GB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Okay, I'll be honest, this is totally designed as a wallpaper image! This was
the first thing that came to mind when I read this topic, though I don't know
why. Small objects on a white plane just has some resonance with the word
minimalism for me personally.

Having said that, in my opinion this image is not minimalist! Certainly there is
not a lot of content in the image, but minimalism is the expression of
something in it's most basic form, and this image does not express any deeper
concept. It is simply an arrangement of glass blocks that is pleasing to the
eye, there's nothing of which this is a minimal expression. Nonetheless, it got
a very positive response on povray.binaries.images, so I submit it here as a
simple visually pleasing abstract for people to enjoy.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Most of the work on this image went on the glass material, it has all the
effects I know of relating to glass:
        -reflections with fresnel falloff
        -large phong highlights to give a "sheen" effect (using pov's metallic
effect on a black material, to make it obey fresnel, which for some reason pov
doesn't inherrently support on highlights)
        -sharp specular highlights
        -refraction, obviously
        -colour as an interior property, not a surface property, so the amount
of colour depends entirely on the thickness of the glass.

The lighting is radiosity with photons, plus a single light source with accurate
inverse square fall-off.

Other than that, I use a loop to place the objects and vary their parameters.

And I think that's about everything... Pretty minimal really :)

