Le chateau virtuel

Two friends of mine ("SynthWorX": Dirk Schnorpfeil & Olaf Rauch) occasionally stage audio-visual shows with synthesizer music and image projection. I sometimes help with the visual part of the shows. In the past we have created shows using music and slide photography with the occasional computer image thrown in. At one time our subjects have turned towards an artistic approach to the problems of new technologies and two years ago we decided to do a show entirely with computer-generated images.

Inspired by a journey to the Loire valley in France the musicians decided to call the project Le chateau virtuel or "The virtual palace".

The idea was to use computer generated images of scenes that are in some way related to the general concept of a palace or castle like the ones that abound in the aforementioned Loire valley.

We created a lot of scenes with POV-Ray V 2.2 and other software. The show was first staged in June 1995 in Hamburg. The images below were used in that show.

Aerial View 640x480x16M (44 K)

Entrance Hall 640x480x16M (74 K)

Central Courtyard 640x480x16M (81 K)

Picture Gallery 640x480x16M (67 K)

Library 640x480x16M (62 K)

Snooker table 800x600x16M (103 K)

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer (POV-Ray)

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer is a copyrighted freeware program that allows a user to easily create fantastic, three dimensional, photo-realistic images on just about any computer. POV-Ray reads standard ASCII text files that describe the shapes, colors, textures and lighting in a scene and mathematically simulates the rays of light moving through the scene to produce a photo-realistic image!

No traditional artistic or programming skills are required to use POV-Ray. First, you describe a picture in POV-Ray's scene description language, then POV-Ray takes your description and automatically creates an image from it with near perfect shading, perspective, reflections and lighting.

In addition to the process known as "raytracing," newer versions of POV can also use a variant of the process known as "radiosity" to add greater realism to scenes, particularly those which use diffuse light such as the fluorescent lighting you might find in an office building.

The capabilities of POV are very extensive. This is no toy, it can render complex images which are impossible using many commercial packages. POV can simulate many atmospheric and volumetric effects (such as smoke and haze) which are very difficult to duplicate in any but the best commercial programs...

Here are some highlights of POV-Ray's features:

• Easy to use scene description language
• Large library of stunning example scene files
• Standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors and textures
• Very high quality output image files (24-bit color.)
• 15 and 24 bit color display on IBM-PC's using appropriate hardware
• Create landscapes using smoothed height fields
• Spotlights for sophisticated lighting
• Phong and specular highlighting for more realistic-looking surfaces.
• Several image file output formats including Targa, dump and raw
• Wide range of shapes:
  Basic Shape Primitives such as... Sphere, Box, Quadric, Cylinder, Cone, Triangle and Plane
• Advanced Shape Primitives such as... Torus (Donut), Hyperboloid, Paraboloid, Bezier Patch, Height Fields (Mountains), Blobs, Quartics, Smooth Triangles (Phong shaded)
• Shapes can easily be combined to create new complex shapes. This feature is called Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray supports unions, merges, intersections and differences in CSG.
• Objects are assigned materials called textures. (A texture describes the coloring and surface properties of a shape.)
• Built-in color patterns: Agate, Bozo, Checker, Granite, Gradient, Leopard, Mandel, Marble, Onion, Spotted, Radial, Wood and image file mapping.
• Built-in surface bump patterns: Bumps, Dents, Ripples, Waves, Wrinkles and mapping.
• Users can create their own textures or use pre-defined textures such as... Mirror, Metals like Chrome, Brass, Gold and Silver, Bright Blue Sky with Clouds, Sunset with Clouds, Sapphire Agate, Jade, Shiny, Brown Agate, Apocalypse, Blood Marble, Glass, Brown Onion, Pine Wood, Cherry Wood
• Combine textures using layering of semi-transparent textures or tile or material map files.
• Display preview of image while computing (not available on all computers)
• Halt rendering when part way through
• Continue rendering a halted partial scene later
  

POV-Ray is written in highly portable C source code and it can be compiled and run on many different computers. There is specific source code in the source archive for UNIX, X-Windows, VAX, and generic computers. If you have one of these, you can use the C compiler included with your operating system to compile a POV-Ray executable for your own use. Users on high powered computers like Suns, SGI, RS-6000's, Crays, and so on use this method to run POV-Ray.

All versions of the program share the same ray tracing features like shapes, lighting and textures. In other words, an IBM-PC can create the same pictures as a Cray supercomputer as long as it has enough memory.

© 1997 by Ralf Hüls. Permission to copy, print or redistribute granted, provided the image is not altered, I am identified as the artist, and no charge is made for the distribution.

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