Photos and Raytracings: Objects

I wanted a break from trees and grass, so I made a chessboard. Chess pieces are exceedingly fun to raytrace. The last time I did them, I was using a CAD program. I'm running Linux now and can't run it anymore, so this time they were done manually, by entering coordinates in a file. This was fine for the trees, but the chess pieces would definitely have been easier with something interactive.

The pieces are based fairly closely on an actual chess set I have (and like) except for the knight. The knight in my actual chess set is not stylized, but an actual carving of a horse with distinct hair and features; there was no way I was going to be able to do that, so I went with the abstract version.

The wood textures for the pieces and stone textures for the board were trivial, because the capability to generate them is built into the raytracer. All I specify is the colors and a few parameters.

The raytracing time on these was only a few minutes. If you'd like a better view of the piece shapes, you can see a version with more light.

When I registered brightshiny.org, I wanted a picture with some bright, shiny objects for the web page. I made this.

All the shapes are the same; four pyramids with a cube in the center. The pyramids have rounded corners, obtained by intersecting them with a cylinder. The colors, locations, and rotations are randomly generated. This was sufficiently simple that no real programming was required; it was done entirely in the Povray scene description language.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the appearance of the material in this one; I wanted it shinier somehow. However, it's nonetheless better than this original version.

Well, we stuck a bunch of candles and lamps out on the patio, and took pictures of them. There were several different exposures, some more than this and some less, but this was my favorite. I also like this picture in Black and White, possibly a bit better than the color version.

Thanks to Courtney for arranging the candles.

What makes this picture interesting is the floor in the sunbeam.

Yes, the floor.

Specifically, notice that the floor can be seen.

This means that there is not a cat on it.

Yes, it's a sunbeam without a cat.

Happily, the world did not end.

(I also have a black and white version of this picture.)

When I was in seventh grade, I was forced to construct a kite as a school project.

This picture was taken with a 200mm lens and a 2x teleconverter, and is the closest I've been to a kite since.

This picture was missing from the web for a long time, because I wanted to surprise someone who reads my web page with a gift of the print, and then I forgot to go back and list it for the next two years.

This is the inside of one of the windows in the tower at the Mt. Auburn cemetery. It was taken in the fall, after the goths who hang out on the top of the tower had apparently withered and blown away for the year.

There's a picture of the outside of the tower over here, number 3484.

About a year after the previous picture, I went back and took this one. I quite like the concept but I think the execution could use some revision.

I thought the red color of the rust was my favorite part of this picture, but then I make a black and white version which actually isn't bad at all. The black and white version is processed to be similar to what I would have gotten if I had used a blue filter.

Copyright (C) 2007 by Terran Melconian. You may mirror this page for personal use. Images may be downloaded and printed. All other rights reserved.
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