mh-z | web-log

It started with this:

Which eventually became this:

But in the meantime, I had tried out some ideas like this:

And this:

And this:

I never put those ones up, but I did use this one for a while:

Here it is! When I was in high school I made some nice color covers for our literary journal, and the year after I left the next class wanted me to make a cover for them. So I put this together, but I thought I’d lost the image long ago. But I just found it! The title of that issue was “waiting”. Not my best work, in retrospect (though I thought it was cool at the time), but that’s what you can do in a hurry with TrueSpace2. I made those hourglasses from scratch, though I don’t think they actually have sand in them. I’m sure you can claim that’s symbolic of something.

Another raytraced image showing a grid of spheres reflecting each other. Why is this posted here? Why, just to take up space, of course. And break up the monotony of the text. So enjoy it before I decide it’s taking up too much space and take it down!

Because a picture is worth a thousand words. And because that way, I don’t have to write any words at all. Seriously, I like playing with the http://www.povray.org“>POV-Ray textures and various parameters each one can contain. For example, the spheres and donut rings have an “iridescence” value, which creates the rainbowy colors. They’re also transparent with a very low refractivity value (as if one was inside water (or maybe even a much denser material), looking into glass spheres containing air). That creates the illusion that there are two spheres (one inside the other) when really there’s only one, which is a rather strange effect. Maybe more like being encased inside diamond (very dense) looking into air. The wall in back is both transparent and reflective.

I don’t think this is a great image in terms of appearance or composition or colors or anything like that, but it was fun to jump back into graphics after not doing that for a while. My old office wants more artwork for their walls, and I’d like to create something worthy of the excellent framing job we had done last time. So here’s a little bit of a warm-up.

I’m rendering a scene with POV-Ray at 12000×5333 pixels, and in 11 hours 13 minutes it is 3% complete. Rough calculation gives 15 days to completion. The scene is filled with mirrors and lights, and uses every level of trace recursion I give it, currently set at 20 levels. (It involves the camera being inside a mirrored box, so that you can theoretically see to infinity in the reflections. The "barbershop mirrors" effect, but without your own head in the way.) I don’t want to wait two weeks, but I don’t want to sacrifice any part of the render quality…