All images copyright © 2000, Sean O'Malley
Mug My first rendering using BMRT. The mug is a
NURBs model created in Rhinocerous and exported to a RIB file. The bubbles are a glassy surface over
the "coffee" with a displacement map made with Leveller's "Bubbles" plugin. The shaders used for the ceramic mug
and wood table are both pre-made. Notice how radiosity adds detail to shadowed areas and the "reflection" at the base of the mug.
Penguin Ummm...
Arch Illusion I A two-story pavilion, yet the walkway is a perfectly level surface that rests on the ground.
Arch Illusion II A different perspective, showing the sliced arch in the foreground that creates the illusion.
Imposso-Box It's very difficult to generate realistic optical illusions (oxymoron?) by modelling them out of solid objects, but it's possible. It would be possible to see how this was done if the camera were moved.
Imposso-Triangular-Shaped-Thingy Another optical illusion. Same principle as the one above, but this was a bit easier to create.
Mt. St. Helen's, Washington. POV-Ray doesn't really excel at rendering heightfields, as can be seen. Produced from actual DEM (Digital Elevation Model) data from the USGS. Submitted to the Internet Raytracing Competition. Click here to read the judges' comments. (There are more realistic versions of this kind of image on the Topography page.)
A Day In... This placed 5 places below the image above in the IRTC. Good thing it got good ratings in "Concept" or it would've really gone down there. Read the comments here. About the image: It's supposed to be what a caveman saw once just as he woke up. (Hence the extreme blurriness. Get it? Ha ha!)
Tree and Sky Now this is artistic! The background image is completely fictional - not scanned - but made with a very interesting POV-Ray plugin. Then I had to figure out how to simulate a 2-D silhouette for the foreground. They
are actually three-dimensional objects, it just required some modification of the lighting values for their textures.
Biosphere An image I submitted to the Internet Raytracing Competition (IRTC) on the subject of "Imaginary Worlds."
I took a whole fifteen minutes putting this image together, so I'm not surprised that it didn't do very well; I just wanted to see what kind of rating I would get. Answer: 97th out of 143! Better yet, people submitted
some comments: click here to read them. There seem to be technical issues involving my choice of camera focus and sand dunes, but other than that... (This image placed much higher
than another I submitted in the same round, located on page 3.)
Stained Glass I A stained-glass window with a light shining through. This is kind of dull, isn't it?
Stained Glass II What a difference some fog can make! These two stained-glass window scenes are exactly the same, except this one has some dust/fog/mist
added to show light rays, and the other doesn't. Makes a big difference: this image took over 60 hours to render, while the one above (without fog) took about 7 minutes. Compare this to the Rose Window down below.
Pool System All your favorite planets polished to a shine and put on a pool table. I didn't put any rings on Saturn... for artistic reasons.
One of my favorite images. Was re-rendered in 6/01 to make use of fuzzy lighting and POV-Ray's radiosity.
Rose Window Kind of the skeleton of a rose window with a spotlight shining through it. The pattern in the window was very easy to make with a simple L-system I wrote, but it took half an hour to
render because of the fog! I blurred the image just a bit.
Rose in Vase Possibly my most realistic L-system-generated plant yet. Using LParser, I made an L-system which could generate millions of random rose stems (if I ever needed them!), and
I thought this one looked "natural" enough. Took me a while to figure out how to put toothed edges on the leaves, but it worked! The petals are slightly translucent and cast a red shadow
on the ground.
Rose in Spotlight Same as above, only I added some fog to the scene which reacts with the spotlight above the rose. (Similar to Stage Penguin, which appears on the
Part 2 raytracing page.) I would use this effect more since you can see the actual rays of the light in the scene, but it takes a lot of processing time.
Room at Night Someone's at work on the next great novel? The writing on the paper is just a picture I drew and pasted onto the surface of a really flat cube.
The lamp has a spotlight in it to cast some illumination, and the wine glass (in the scene only for variety) is a rotational "lathe" object made out of green glass.
The pencil isn't too good.
Winter Scene Three dead trees with a small, blooming bush in the middle of winter. Since it takes so much data to produce one of these trees, it's actually the same tree in all three
places. Everything in this scene was made with an L-system. About the texture of the snow: It's the same one I used for the vase in Rose in Vase. (Okay - I was too lazy to make up a
new texture!) I think the little plant in this scene is the same one as in Plant on Mars.
Water Lilies The lily pads and the flowers in this scene were made with L-systems. Of course, all of the flowers are exactly the same, as are the lily pads,
just stuck in different places. To make the tree-like reflections in the water, I took the lazy way out: I stuck a bunch of wood-colored cylinders where the camera can't see them.
The sky is a giant sphere blue towards the top and grey towards the middle, which kind of gives the illusion of cloudiness. (Now that's lazy!) You can tell I took a lot of care with this one.
EarthJar I was messing around with POV-Ray's "media" settings where gases can be made which appear to emit light, and, naturally, this is what followed.
The earth is a sphere covered with a picture of a map, and the jar it's in is just a rotational lathe object filled with WEIRD GLOWING BLUE GAS. I stuck a spotlight
above it to add to the effect.
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Planets While we're on the subject of planets, here are a few more renderings complete with a space-probe thing. All of the planets were formed by gigantic map projections which I "wrapped" around a sphere, and thanks to some
good camera work, it's hard to tell that the space probe is nearly the same size as the planet it's next to. (I hear the island of Manhattan could easily fit into the Red Spot on Jupiter a few times.)
The first is of Jupiter, the second Mars, and the third, supposedly, is Pluto. Not quite sure about the accuracy of that one... I placed a small sphere out of camera range on the Jupiter image to cast a shadow like a moon. The Pluto image is completely unrealistic: the sun is too bright, and the dim star at the very bottom is actually closer to the camera than Pluto is - I used it to illuminate the back of the planet. (Otherwise all that could be seen is a thin crescent and the unlit side would be pitch black.) Also, the starfields on each of these images are random and much too uniform. Wonder if anyone has a map of the whole sky? Thanks to Andrea Valina Ashio for the Space Probe model used in the Jupiter and Mars images. |
  
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A Plant on Mars Here's what NASA really found. No, I didn't create the Mars Rover model in this scene but I couldn't resist using it when I found it on the web.
Much nicer than those fuzzy photos NASA uses, isn't it?
Fern A simple fern constructed with an L-system that came with LParser (see the L-systems page).
The author of LParser has a rendering of this fern on his web page as well.
Small Bush This is an L-system from the Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. Just a little bush - nothing more.
(Very realistic for the small algorithm that created it, though!)
Daffodil The stem, leaves, and white flower petals off this daffodil were created using L-systems. The slightly translucent pink cup at the top was made
using a cylindrical Bezier patch. Not one of my more impressive flowers!
Glassodil One of the nice things about raytracing is you can make any object out of any material - trees out of stone or plastic, or in this case a daffodil
made out of glass. I call it Glassodil!
