TITLE: Bottled Worlds

NAME: Matt Walton
COUNTRY: United Kingdom

EMAIL: matt@alledora.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.alledora.co.uk (coming during March 2002)

TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: mawwdbtl.jpg
ZIPFILE: mawwdbtl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.5 beta 11 for GNU/Linux


TOOLS USED: 
    GNU Emacs 21.1 (scene file creation and editing)
            Steve's Object Builder 1.5 (modelling of bottle)
            The GIMP 1.2.1 (conversion to JPEG)
            all running on GNU/Linux


RENDER TIME: 
    5 hours 27 minutes 25 seconds


HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon Thunderbird 800MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    At the lowest level, this is a world within a world, quite
literally - or rather, a planet within another planet, like those Russian dolls
which stack inside each other. But these two worlds are also in a bottle, which
stands within another world - and who knows how many worlds the world the
bottle stands is is contained by.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    It's all modelled by hand except for
the bottle, which is modelled sort of by hand using Steve's Object Builder, a
useful Perl module which generates POV-Ray objects from Perl function calls. I
suppose I could have modelled the bottle in POV-Ray itself after some thought,
but I was originally planning to make the shape a lot better than it currently
is. Unfortunately I ran out of time...

The first incarnation of this image was going to be a city in a bottle. The
bottle, however, went hideously wrong - it was made of a CSG merge of various
primitive shapes, which produced the perfect bottle shape but unfortunately the
merge wasn't able to remove all the internal surfaces, and so when transparent
it looked terrible. So I switched to this one, which should probably be a lathe
in all honestly - might have rendered a lot faster. Still, the smooth triangle
mesh which Steve's Object Builder produced does make some nice effects in the
highlights.

The reason the city vanished was because that was looking awful as well, and I
didn't have the time to detail it properly. This is my first IRTC entry, and I
knew it wasn't going to be very good, but honestly, that city was awful. If I
ever get it right I'll put it on my website (when I've written it).

So I decided to put an Earth-like planet in the bottle instead, and then came
the idea of putting another planet inside that to really emphasise the theme.
Four bottles in the scene took all night to render less than 25% of the image,
so I had to settle for one as time was getting short. There's nothing
spectacular about the planet - just some layered textures really - water first,
then land, then clouds. They both have scattering media around them for
atmospheres, but with the caustic highlights that's more or less invisible.

Those highlights, the result of using photons, caused me some concern, and I
would have tried to fix them - but I ran out of time. Too much other stuff to
do - maybe next time the topic's something I think I can do I'll get an earlier
start at it and actually do something decent. Notice at the top of the inner
planet how the shadow just looks totally horrible.

I do rather like the effect the photons had on the bottle though...

The surface the bottle's standing on is just a plane with a granite pigment and
a granite normal.

The scene was rendered with photons on, max_trace_level = 255 (and it used all
of it) and adc_bailout = 0.1, antialiasing on (threshold 0.3, method 2) at
1024x768.

The zip file contains the scene file, the include file output by Steve's Object
Builder and the SOB source Perl script. This is all that's needed to render the
image, although why you might want to is beyond me.

