All images are in chronolgical order! The elder first; I leave them so because it is so nice to look back at the origins.
I rendered the final image at 1172x870 with a heavy anti-alias, I rendered the first 500 more difficult lines on a Mac IIci and it took 72 hours, then I finished the image on a 9500/120 and it took up another one hour and a half. Probably I exaggerated with the anti-alias, in this backlit image.
Here I worked with ready fractal textures (marble and stones), on lights (they are not all white!) and on modularity: I made just one column which I repeated, and the same grooves in them are just one repeated around. This module splitting of the scene allows working with different objects and refining them at a later point, but still allowing to preview the whole scene.
This image is a virtual show room for my pictures (I am a hobby Photographer). Here I experimented with texture brushes, the use of which is not intuitive in PoV. Not only the pictures are images, but also the ocher walls are a slightly textured, to give them a more realistic appearance.
I also worked with spotlights, which are really located in the green cone-spots. I added a central light, the reflex of which is visible on the blue ceiling.
The image took a bit more than 3 hours of render at 640x480 on my MacII.
This image represents a temple-like public building surrounded by choking skyscrapers. The skyscrapers are stylized by repeating bitmapped brushes, while the temple has procedural stones, as the sky. The most complex part was the modelling of the tympanum (made with CSG out of a box) and the best-looking proportions. The image is rendered as a sunset with the typical red color. It took 14 hours and a 1/2 to render at 832x624 on my MacII.
This image is a reconstruction of a pocket-watch, given me by a friend of mine (now sadly disappeared). While I just made a quick enviroment, I tried to make a good modelling of the watch itself. A first concern were the curved shapes, which I stylized with parts of scaled spheres (note the inside of the cover which is curved too). But a lot of effort was put in the modelling of the glass and the surrounding silver. By so far the image looked still unsatisfying, because I used for the dial just a brush an a disk and the hands were just painted on. Unrealistic! So i made the hands by extruding a height-field and then cutting it just below the surface: now the hands even cast a shadow on the dial!
The final render, at 832x624 with anti-alias, took good 47 hours, 17' and 53" of render on my faithful MacII (some 50 million Ray-Shape Intersection tests were made!)
I had to make a design of a piece of furnishing for interior decoration. So why do it by hand? Once i sketched it on paper, i began modelling it. Note that the interior of the lamp is a real paraboloid! This is optically better than the original version which required a cone with a lens! That was a motive to use the new primitive I discovered. Then I wanted that glass glow a bit and using the normal "perfect" textures it was just dark, so I declared the wole thing a
light_source
! And it worked. I played around a bit with the chrome (if it is too "mirror-like" in this simple enviroment you can hardly distinguish the object) and rendered it. I hadn't much time.
The final render, at 832x624, took 1 hour 20' on a Quadra 840AV.
I tried to make an artistic picture using the rendering tool. This wants to be a sort of surreal landscape. I used blobs made with the BlobSculptor, the sky textures and the big sphere used the "clear" color, and different turbolence factors. The water is an infinite wave plane made of glass with a blue plane under it. A double illumination (2 suns?) provides an irreal atmosphere and better details/shades as only the backlight. The small blobs are metallic, reflecting the enviroment. All this complex stuff, took, at 832x624, more than 57 hours to render on my faithful Mac][. Continuous render in summertime! whoh, but everything remained cool!
This image was designed to be a cover for a LP album. It should give the impression of digital, energy and similar attributes of that kind of music. I long experimented with the camera position and target, while the lights inside the sphere were also troubleful. The textures were made with Adobe Texture Shop; and retouched and modified (both in appeareance as in color spectrum) in Adobe Photoshop 2.51. After several previews and after asking the customer, I launched the final render, 2400x1800 pixlels (approx. 30 cm width at 200dpi). It took 17 hours 45' to render on a Quadra 840AV. (about 800 million Ray-Shape Intersection tests were made!)
This is an attempt to create the inside view of a Steel-Glass construction. I repeated several times modules that contained one solid glass (that is with depth) and its steel tube. To add some enviroment I put in a nice cloudy sky with some evening haze and the central water-box. That part was also fine-tuned a lot: it's a glass box with inside water. So finally I ended up with a scene full of glass and water, this extended the rendering time incredibly (activating of course the reflection/refraction in the ray-trace options). At 832x624 it took 36h 15' to render on a Quadra840AV! 2 billion ray-shape tests were made! More elements could have been added to the scene for more realismus, but I didn't have the time and it would have confused the reflections.
This image represent some metallic rings of a Hard Disk mechanism. When I unmounted the drive those rings shined so nice on my desk that I wanted to reproduce them. I got only close to the original cuttered surface, but the lights and reflections demonstrate once again the quality of PoV-Ray. This image was rendered with radiosity.
This image makes use of both focal blur and anti-alias, which give a soft and pleasant aspect but which extend render times a good deal. The eggs, the egg-holders and the dish are created using sweeped patches.
There are no particular techniques in this image; just pacience in modeling the glope with the little pin and pearls. The vase is a surface of revolution and it has a small amount of iridescence to give that particular oiled glass surface effect.Everything rendered with Smellenbergh port of PoVray on a MacIIfx.
I started to work on this image with the main purpose of studying glass, transparent objects and their borders. I assembled then the pieces afterward together to form this still-life. You can see that the caustics add much realism to the image. Rendered with MacMegaPov (1027x768 with aa) in 116 hours and 35 minutes on a Quadra840AV!!! I had to extend the refraction depth to level 11 in order to avoid black spots. As a frend of mine suggested, the theme was that one of the current IRTC, I sent the image in, was accepted and got 69th.
As often this image was inspiered by pictures found on magazines. I see them and then I think I can do them too. I paid attention to the metallic look, the chrome and the rendering of the brushed-like parts. I experimented with some lighting techniques (small colored spot putting accents on some parts) and also photons patch from MegaPov was used.
An image of an imaginary instrument placed in a circular temple. I experimented with lighting techniques to obtain the effect of a low sunset shining through the windows, MegaPov radiosity was used too. The small lamps emit a cone of bluish light the dome is partially made out of glass. Everyting is like always modeled with paper and pencil.
I was asked to visually represent the working concept of a product, in this case an on-line virus scanner. I wanted both retain the "filtering" action easy to spot as well as to give an overall "computer" aspect. Everything was made in PoV except fot the viruses which where modelled in Amapi.
I was insipred by M. C. Escher's form, though what he could do with a drawing I couldn't with realistic imaging. So I worked around the theme, I played with metallic reflection. Overall I obtained a quite electronic image which has quite a visual impact though its lighting. Everything was coded with care in PoV.
An oil lamp made entirely in MegaPov. I wanted to experiment again with glass, with light sources and with the sphere-sweep patch. I took care in designing the reflections and the shapes. Note the caustics of the flame and the caustics given by the external light-source. The scene is very nice without the wooden plane, but using the latter it becomes more realistic, even if detail is loss.
When I saw in a store a display of different designer lamps which played variations on composing several lamps I decided to make one in PoV. I wanted to look if ray-tracing was enough to reproduce the light games on the various transparent surfaces. So I took care in defining the light bulbs and making the best materials I could make. No radiosity was used in the final render, at the beginning I wanted to use field depth, but to obtain good results many rays were needed and the several light source made endering times unbearable even on a G3.