TITLE: The Aquarium
NAME: Windell H. Oskay
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: windell@oskay.net
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: aquarium.jpg
ZIPFILE: aquarium.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray, GraphicConverter (conversion of final image to JPG only)

RENDER TIME: 
    ~16 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Linux box

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A happy little goldfish swims in its lovely aquarium on a sunny day.  
What could possibly go wrong?

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This scene was made entirely in POV-Ray, comprising about 1500 lines.  I've 
include the source, which is heavily commented.

Most of the "interesting" modeling is done with isosurface objects and sphere
sweeps.  

The blender consists of several distinct elements.  The glass pitcher is made
with an isosurface object for the exterior, merged with a sphere-sweep handle,
with a set of spheres subtracted to form the interior. 
The goldfish is made of sphere sweeps. The lid is made of superellipsoids, with
a cylinder through the center to represent the top cap.  The screw-on base of
the pitcher is made with a pair of lathe objects, one for the chrome interior,
one for the white structure that supports the blades.  The beehive-shaped lower
part of the blender is an isosurface object.  The labels, both on the blender
and on the can of fish food, are image maps made in POV-Ray.  I've included the
.pov files to generate those maps in the .zip archive.  The cord of the blender
is a hand-crafted sphere sweep object. 

The room that we are looking at is fully modeled, and has six walls.  The
windowframe is modeled with simple boxes.  The countertop and windowsill are
superellipsoids.  The distribution of spilled fish flakes on the countertop is
taken from a function describing the distribution of rocks on the ground in the
isocacti.pov sample file.  There are also some interesting objects out of view
to make good reflections.  

Off in the distance, there is grass, along with a bush and tree, the latter two
being made of isosurfaces.  The window is rendered with a rather heavy normal
to help suggest distance.  Focal blur is also used to help suggest distance,
and to draw the eye of the viewer away from the trees and towards the fish.

The scene is rendered with two light sources and heavy radiosity, to suggest the
intensity of the sunbeam coming through the window.  The sunlight is an area
light to give the soft shadow on the countertop, and a second, fill light is
used indoors to improve the contrast of the final scene, providing shadows for
depth cues on the windowsill, blender and fish food can.   Photon mapping is
employed chiefly to provide interesting caustics on the fish.  Unfortunately,
between focal blur, radiosity, and photons, render time becomes a factor.

