EMAIL: rof@mail.com
NAME: Robert Fremin
TOPIC: Worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Thirst of Christ
COUNTRY: Sweden
WEBPAGE: http://fly.to/robertf/
RENDERER USED: PovRay 3.1g.watcom.win32 [Pentium II optimized]
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (Signature), Compupic Pro (JPEG conversion)
RENDER TIME: 26m parse + 1h 29m render time @800x600 recursive AA l.3
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 600MHz, 256MB, pencil & paper

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

My attempt at abstract symbolic art.
What would the Earth and it's inhabitants be without religion? Very
possibly much happier. The grimmest religion of them all has proven
to be christianity, which have killed in the name of God for 2000
years. Crusaders, inquisitions and missionaries have slaughtered
people in the past, now it is just plain people doing the same.
Northern Ireland and middle east is just some places where God is used
as an excuse to kill each other. Sects, cults and free churches make
mindless drones of people, using distorted versions of an old book
to prove their point. Taking all their drones their money and making
them dependant of it too. Making the leaders a God, herding flocks
of sheep.
This is of course just my opinion.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

How did I first come up with the idea? Well, "worship" made me
immediately think of money, so I used altavista to find me a nice pic
of a dollar bill and doubled its size and retouched it with PSP.
So I made a nice wobbly dollar bill, and thought of what's next to
fill out the image. Hmmm, religion, maybe all religous symbols I could
imagine, making a field of religion? I made one cross, but found out it
looked like sh*t. Grass, I thought. Lots of grass with one single fallen
stone in the middle, and the bill. And that's the way it started.
As a software developer I enjoy the fact that the code is complex, yet
very compact in this image. I am a veteran in IRTC really, competing
from 1997 to 1999, but have had a 2 year break because of the time and
the inspiration that just haven't been available since. I have some
unfinished, unpublished work as proof of my efforts to do something
about it. :)

* The dollar bills
Image map painted on a triangle mesh generated through manipulating sine
functions. Random deviations make each bill similar, but not identical.

* The blood
A blob made from randomly modified spheres, until I was satisfied. I made
it look just that thick and shiny I have seen in movies. I myself
haven't lost a pool of blood yet to study material behaviour. ;)

* The religous cross
Just boxes and cylinders with granite function materials.

* The grass
OK, the hard part. The grass straws are different at different depth to
save rendering time. In front they have leaves and stem, all tilted
randomly. Then comes straws with simpler leaves, and beyond that there
are just triangles. The straws are placed in a x by z pattern with a
little random deviation to make a evenly filled grass field. To save even
more time I marked the camera edges and then made the grass field a
trapetsoid shape, just where the visible area is.
Around the cross I didn't want grass sticking through the stone, so I
made collision detection functions to avoid placing straws at forbidden
positions. Actually I made it scale down the straws at those positions
so that it wouldn't look like bare ground over there. The straws have
also random shade of green of course. Some straw leaves cut through
eachother, but what you don't see (at glance) won't hurt you.

Everything is lit by a 3 by 3 area light. There is also a sky sphere above, and
a ground plane (not so visible) with dirt texture function.