It's my dad's birthday tomorrow - so I thought I'd use POV-Ray to 
construct an interpretation of the title of one of my favourite Pink 
Floud albums. (My dad likes Floyd too - and this image is now on his 
birthday card.)

The resulting image isn't nearly as cool as I'd hoped. The spilt tea 
doesn't look like tea - or even particularly like a liquid. The saucer 
took me many hours to create, but doesn't look much like any saucer I've 
ever seen. I'm quite pleased with the cup. (Maybe should have put some 
gaps in that ring round the base...) And the black bit in the center was 
supposed to be like a glowing space nebula... or... something. But 
actually it just looks daft. (Oh, and the wood texture sucks.)

Anyone else have any comments?

Andrew @ home.

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> It's my dad's birthday tomorrow - so I thought I'd use POV-Ray to
> construct an interpretation of the title of one of my favourite Pink
> Floud albums. (My dad likes Floyd too - and this image is now on his
> birthday card.)

I don't know much about Pink Floyd and their album's, so I've got no clue
what you're after. But I'll try and help some with the technical stuff:

The spilt tea is just to thick. Make it much thinner, with proper relation
in thickness to the cup. Some more drops, formed to show some sort of
puddle, might do some wonders as well, rather than just two cylindrical
drops. Perhaps you'd want to use a particle system for it, there's Rune's
and mine.

The saucer, well I'm not sure what you're after with that one, so I can't
comment much on that. As for the wood: try using a repeat-warp to simulate
some tiling, add some black-hole warps for branch-holes. Rotate the plane so
that the wood-grain doesn't run along an axis.

Keep it up!

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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> The spilt tea is just to thick. Make it much thinner, with proper relation
> in thickness to the cup.

I agree, I thought it was a coaster at first.

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40b9d532@news.povray.org...
> It's my dad's birthday tomorrow - so I thought I'd use POV-Ray to
> construct an interpretation of the title of one of my favourite Pink
> Floud albums. (My dad likes Floyd too - and this image is now on his
> birthday card.)
>
Aaah Sid Barret's era...
Nice idea
For the tea, it looks like it has a filtering pigment.
Did you try a completely transparent pigment (transmit 1) and interior with
a fade_color?
Most liquids have no surface pigment but an interior color which grows with
the thickness.
I'd lower specular roughness as well

Happy birthday to your dad :)

Marc

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> I don't know much about Pink Floyd and their album's, so I've got no clue
> what you're after. But I'll try and help some with the technical stuff:

Well, the actual album cover work doesn't feature any saucers... (It is 
rather cool though - and fits the dark mysterious mood of the album.)

The idea was to have a saucer, with a spilt cup of tea next to it 
(hopefully leading to am impression that something... weird just 
occurred). Next to it, a saucer, with some sort of liquid in it, and 
some sort of mysterious colour effect going on inside the liquid (hadn't 
decided exactly what yet).

...and then there's the image I actually constructed.

The saucer took forever. The cup wasn't actually too bad to do. (BTW, it 
*isn't* hollow - but since it's facing away, you can't tell.) I fiddled 
with the water/tea for ages, but in the end, the best I could do was to 
add a sky plane and a slight normal pattern to the water. If I leave it 
transparent, it's almost invisible.

The "secrets" (black liquid) was the last part to be added. Original 
plan was some strange arrangement of tealeaves - I hadn't thought any 
further than that. But what I ended up doing was a slightly spacey blue 
crackle pattern with a scattering of stars (which is *also* a crackle 
pattern).

> The spilt tea is just to thick. Make it much thinner, with proper relation
> in thickness to the cup.

*checks source*

Yes, it's supposedly 1 cm thick. Maybe that is a little excessive... 
(The cup is supposedly 5 cm in radius - maybe that's a little small.)

> Some more drops, formed to show some sort of
> puddle, might do some wonders as well, rather than just two cylindrical
> drops.

Yes, I think it probably does need more drops...

> Perhaps you'd want to use a particle system for it, there's Rune's
> and mine.

Will maybe try that in future, but it's too late now. (The event is 
*tomorrow* ;-))

> The saucer, well I'm not sure what you're after with that one, so I can't
> comment much on that.

Well, doesn't look very much like a saucer, does it?

I think maybe the edge should have a lip on it - but it took me a few 
hours of CGS with various cones to get the dip in the middle to work. 
(Now I've seen the final image, I could probably have done it a simpler 
way... *sigh*)

> As for the wood: try using a repeat-warp to simulate
> some tiling, add some black-hole warps for branch-holes. Rotate the plane so
> that the wood-grain doesn't run along an axis.

Does POV-Ray have a pattern that draws concentric cylinders?

The "cylinder" pattern only draws 1 cylinder. In the end, I used "onion" 
with uneven scaling. The idea was to then slice this at a slight angle 
to create V-shapes - and then add some turbulence.

I should probably add that the LCD display on my laptop is *lame*. The 
image looks like a glass of beer. All the colours are muted and faded. 
It wasn't until I tried it on a better screen that I realised the 
colours were totally over-saturated and had to turn them down (resulting 
in the image you see now, which looks like beer on my laptop).

I think the wood is probably much too orange. (How many kinds of wood 
are that insane shade?) Like I say, it looked brown on my screen. I 
never did get the scaling and turbulence right to make the rings small 
and yet distinct, while still being fuzzy and turbulent...

> Keep it up!

Ah well - thanks for the encouragement anyway! :-S

Andrew @ home.

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>>It's my dad's birthday tomorrow - so I thought I'd use POV-Ray to
>>construct an interpretation of the title of one of my favourite Pink
>>Floud albums. (My dad likes Floyd too - and this image is now on his
>>birthday card.)
>>
> 
> Aaah Sid Barret's era...

I'll take your word for it. :-)
(I suppose I could go check the sleave notes, couldn't I?)

> Nice idea

Thanx.

As I say, it's supposed to be a spilt cup of tea, which "something" 
freaky happening in the saucer. But you probably wouldn't know it from 
the picture... *sigh*

> For the tea, it looks like it has a filtering pigment.

Yup.

> Did you try a completely transparent pigment (transmit 1) and interior with
> a fade_color?

Nope. But maybe I should...

> Most liquids have no surface pigment but an interior color which grows with
> the thickness.

Yes - especially something like tea which is a suspension...

> I'd lower specular roughness as well

Yeah, I think it is perhaps a little too shiny...

What do you make of the texture of the cup?

> Happy birthday to your dad :)

Thanx :-)

Andrew @ home.

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40ba331e@news.povray.org...
>
> Does POV-Ray have a pattern that draws concentric cylinders?

It is what wood pattern does if you put no turbulence


Marc

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>>Does POV-Ray have a pattern that draws concentric cylinders?
> 
> 
> It is what wood pattern does if you put no turbulence

*slaps head*

Daaaaw!

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