GEODOME by Andy Wardley GEODOME is a ray traced image traced with POV-Ray Version 2.2. I used a utility that I wrote myself, uninspiringly called GEODOME (V1.1), to create a geodesic dome out of black metal pipes and joints. Inside this, there is a blue metallic sphere with some interesting lightning arcing around it. The lanscape consists of stone blocks, walkways and ramps and looks very aztec-like in appearance. There is a green mist crawling across the ground. The sky I'm particulary pleased with. A clever bit of tom-texturey on my part has produced one of the best looking sky and cloud effects I've seen yet from POV-Ray. Check it out and let me know what you think. Overall, I've been working on the image for about 3 months (no, not solidly, but a lot of time went into it). The final render took 167 hours to trace on an IBM PC, 486DX 50MHz with 16 Meg RAM, running MS-DOS 5.0. The official Intel Code Builder version of POV-Ray 2.2 was used. The complexity of the geodome certainly contributed to the length of time to trace, but the main factor was the big fat area light I used (appreciate the smooth shadows) coupled with the complexity of the ground and fog textures (lots of transparent, bumpy and layered bits). Available in a whole host of formats: geodome.tga 2,359,314 bytes 1024x768 24 bit colour geodome.gif 461,860 bytes 1024x768 256 colour geodome.jpg 88,350 bytes 1024x768 24 bit colour jpeg (quality 70) geosmall.gif 11,801 bytes 128x 96 256 colour preview The jpeg shows very little sign of degradation from being compressed, if any. GEODOME, the utility used to create the geodesic dome, is available as freely distributed, public domain archive, GEODOME.ZIP. This includes an IBM PC executable, source code for compiling on other platforms, documentation and examples. The source code isn't available and you probably wouldn't want it anyway. By the time I've included the height maps and data files I used, it would probably be bigger than the picture. Also, 167 hours is a very long time. Any comments, feel free to Email, Andy