Gallery

I have been a ray-tracing enthusiast for years now, fiddling around with the excellent POV-Ray raytracer. This is a small gallery of some of my images, from the sublime (I hope) to the ridiculous (unfortunately).

The Information Superhighway

This image was submitted to the old comp.graphics.raytracing ray-tracing competition (the forerunner to the IRTC) in March 1995, and got first place! Comments from the original text file accompanying my entry:

Well, this image underwent a long, slow evolution. I started thinking about the topic, 'The Internet', which was really crying out for something cyberspacy as an image, even though the concept no doubt is becoming a bit cliche'd. I went through about four or five different designs of what I wanted to do, and then, one night, I suddenly wondered what a network packet really _looked_ like.

Well, tying this up with the whole 'information superhighway' politicobabble didn't take long, and so on paper I had a good idea of what I wanted to do. However, I was really unable to get a good 'tangled cable' effect with the tools I had (specifically Connect The Dots), and I though that a whole heap of joined torus sections might do the job better. I couldn't find a tool to do this, so I did the traditional thing and wrote one, TORPATCH. As might have been expected, writing the tool took more time than anything else about this image... I should release the tool sometime in the coming month, when I have made it sufficiently user-friendly :).

The rest of the image was composed entirely by hand.

The only problem I had then was to decide what lay at the end of the highway? The answer was obvious: Bill Gates, of course!

The Torpatch tool that is mentioned was, indeed, released.

Dolphins at Midnight

This image was submitted to the IRTC for the November-December 2000 round, with the theme of "Contrast". It won Second Place (and as far as I'm concerned there's no shame in losing to Gilles Tran). A description of the creation of this scene is at the IRTC site, and the source code is available from there as well

More recently, I've made an improved version of this scene.

Apple

What sort of caterpillar would eat a steel apple?

This image uses a modified version of Gilles Tran's grass macro: the macro has been modified to allow a grass patch to be created with the grass blades avoiding a spcified object. Without this, the grass went through the apple, which didn't look good. Sources (to this and the other images on this page) available on request!

Touch

A small abstract image. I was interested in exploring the junction between textures, trying to produce an image that made you want to run your fingers over it.

Smallness of Mind

This image started as an essay in determining how large a mesh I could get away with. You can produce a similar look more easily with mirrors, but the lighting is wrong.