My Gallery 1
This gallery shows some of my pictures. I try to give as much background information as possible. This will help to understand the challenges of each image and help you to create your own scenes. Please ignore the old email address in the lower corners of some images. That's my old university address. You find the current contact address on the imprint page.
Dedication
This image was a present to a good friend. In the beginning I did not
know the scene at all, I just wanted to create a nice picture.
Therefore I started to create a dice. It is only a simple dice nothing special,
build by intersecting a cube and a sphere. The points are shaped with a
small sphere and afterwards filled with white hollow hemispheres.
The three big spheres look like Christmas tree balls. They have a highly relective mirror-like surface. The glasses are csg objects. Composed of a cone, a cylinder, and a piece of a sphere. Because the image was rendered with a POV-Ray version before version 3.X, I could not use a surface of revolution or lathe object. These new object types make the life of a glass designer much easier.
The texture of the piece of paper is an image map. I do not like the overall appearance of the paper material, it does not look like paper at all. The pen is another simple csg object. The sky texture was borrowed from a scene I found on the web.
Bridge
The bridge picture was my first POV-Ray 3 scene. It was designed and rendered
with an early beta version, therefore it does not work with 3.1 or 3.5.
I used four new features of POV-Ray 3, the prism object for the bridge, the
brick pattern for the texture of the bridge, and the fog above the
water is created by the ground fog feature. And finally a media glow for the sun.
The land on the other side of the river is a height field with a simple granite texture on it. The sun at the horizon is a media object. This feature gives the sun a glowing touch.
It is an ok picture in my eyes, at least for a first picture with new features. There are several points I could have done better. The water is too bright, the sky forms a sphere, the sky texture looks awful, and the brick texture is poor.
Planet and Nova
This was my first try to simulate a glowing and emitting object without
the use of media, because POV-Ray did not have the feature at this time.
The planet surface is a height field and the texture looks like the Pancake rocks at
the west coast of New Zealand. Of course, at the creation time of the image,
I did not know that.
The sun is a sphere with a bumpy layered texture.
The texture consists of
several single texture with transparency. The corona of the sun is formed by
two transparent spheres with similar textures. It might be pretty interesting to
create a similar image by using new 3.5 features.
Nova was my second POV-Ray 3 image. It uses media for the explosion of the sun. The sun itself is formed by spheres, because I tried to make it irregular. All the lens flare effects are made with the lens flare macro package by Chris Colefax.
All the stars are looking pretty strange. I used a star sky texture I found and paid less attention to the final look. Because I focused my creativity on the explosion. Same for the planet, pretty poor job.
Plant
This image shows one of the main objects of the Museum animation.
We needed a nice but not disturbing object in the entrance hall of our Museum. A big plant
seemed to be the right thing. POV-Ray 2.2 did not offer macros, loops or similar things and
therefore all leafs are placed manually. Month later after finishing the animation we discovered
a tool to create spectacular plants and trees:
LParser.
To make a long story short, the leafs are small strips cut out a sphere. The long bands on the surface are created by a height-field. The remaining object was stretched and colored. The bloom is made of a bumpy sphere with a highly reflective metallic surface. It does not have a stem and does not really look like a bloom, this is intended because we would like to have a unique plant in our entrance hall.