TITLE: Color by Numbers
NAME: Aaron Gage
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: agage@mines.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.mines.edu/students/a/agage
TOPIC: Physics & Math
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: amgcbn.jpg
ZIPFILE: amgcbn.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray 3.0 for Linux

TOOLS USED: 
    Sonya Roberts' tree.pov file

RENDER TIME: 
    52 hours 11 minutes 16 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    i486DX/33 with 8 Megs RAM under Linux 2.0.28

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I have always been amazed at how elusive the mathematics behind physical
phenomena can be -- and how random, chaotic, infinite, and irrational
expressions tend to produce the most interesting results.

What I was trying to capture in this image was a sense that the numbers
behind the things in nature, the quantities that make things beautiful, are
merely hidden among the leaves and clouds.  The Fibonacci numbers describe
the arrangement of leaves and buds on branches.  Photosynthesis among the
leaves converts light energy into food, allowing life on this planet.  The
falling of a leaf is described by a differential equation.  And scattered
about are irrational numbers and expressions that are profound yet simple.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This image was developed over four weeks of test renders and minor changes,
with all placements, textures, and finishes applied through a text editor.

The grass area in the lower half of the image is a heightfield, scaled to be
very flat.  There are six textures over it, which (almost) produce a spectrum
of color from dirt to flowers.  The heightfield was produced with POVray.

The mountains are another height field, created with POVray at a much lower
resolution.  A thin wall of fog was put between the grass and the mountains,
in an attempt to make the mountains look more distant (as though there were
haze between them).

The trees are all the same object, merely copied, rotated around their bases,
and translated.  With my 8 Megs RAM, I could not afford to create a new object
for each tree.  The trees were generated with Sonya Roberts' tree.pov file.

The book was created for this image, using superellipsoids, a cylinder, box,
and .ttf characters.  I created the leather texture for this image.  A high
ambient light setting was used for the title of the book (and image) to make
it visible in the shade of the trees.

The falling leaf was an attempt to suggest motion in a still-frame image,
by using several leaf objects overlaid with varying levels of transparency.

Some of the numbers/expression in the image are difficult to read.  This is
partially intentional, and partly because I don't want to spend another
55 hours of render time to make them brighter.

This image is my first entry into the Internet Ray-tracing Competition.

