This is the second design I've put together in POV-Ray to be used as an
event flyer (see www.psycle.info). It's more-or-less ended up how I wanted
it to look, although I had quite a few more ideas of ways to develop it;
unfortunately once again I was rushed by a deadline!

The only glaring issue is the small amount of empty space in the middle.
This will however be covered by the logo of the event the flyer is for. I
did play around with having a large alien eyeball glaring out from this
space, which I personally thought was the perfect way to tie the scene
together; unfortunately it was difficult to get it right and I didn't have
the time to experiment too much. Also a consensus was reached that this
would take the focus away from the event itself, as the event name would
have to be moved to the top or bottom of the image.

I wrote a number of macros which generate spline functions with a certain
degree of randomness, and generate the tentacle shapes either from blobs,
sphere_sweeps, meshes or series of torii. Extra decorations are then added
at random in the form of further torii or spikes placed (or differenced)
along the spline. Some of these objects are filled with media whereas
others are solid. Colours are chosen by randomly selecting two
complementary hues and fading from one to the other.

The second image is for the reverse side of the flyer; as this will have
more information printed over the top of it, it was intended to be less
vivid. It's generated from exactly the same scene files but with a
different camera position and with the colour selection maths slightly
changed.

I encountered a bug in POV 3.6 and had to switch to MegaPOV for rendering;
occasionally when a spline function is passed as a parameter to a macro,
the parser will fail with a bizarre error message. This bug doesn't seem to
be present in either MegaPOV or the 3.7beta; however I encountered other
crashes in 3.7beta which were possibly due to the scene consuming quite
large amounts of memory.

Overall I'm quite happy with the image, although I'm sure some might find it
a little garish! Comments are very much welcome.

Random Pete

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Attachments:
Download 'front-800.jpg' (300 KB)

Preview of image 'front-800.jpg'

Here is the second image (reverse of flyer)

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Attachments:
Download 'backtentacles-800.jpg' (186 KB)

Preview of image 'backtentacles-800.jpg'

"Random Pete" <pet### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Here is the second image (reverse of flyer)

Wow, wiggly. It is pretty "busy" as an image, but I think that's what you
were going for. Neat Macro.

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"Random Pete" <pet### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>>I encountered a bug in POV 3.6 and had to switch to MegaPOV for rendering;
>>occasionally when a spline function is passed as a parameter to a macro,
>>the parser will fail with a bizarre error message.

If you poke around through other POVRay.general and POVRay.images postings,
you'll find you're not first/alone in this strange bug encounter.  It's
also not present in POV 3.5.  And since I use quite a few spline calls with
while-loops, I run into it quite often.  Anyway, good to hear it's fixed in
3.7Beta (which I haven't tried yet.)

Anyway, really cool images.  Is there an alien clown fish that can live in
this anemone?

Dave Matthews

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Dave Matthews wrote:
> If you poke around through other POVRay.general and POVRay.images postings,
> you'll find you're not first/alone in this strange bug encounter.  It's
> also not present in POV 3.5.  And since I use quite a few spline calls with
> while-loops, I run into it quite often.  Anyway, good to hear it's fixed in
> 3.7Beta (which I haven't tried yet.)

Yep, I found a few places referencing the bug, which was a relief since 
it showed I wasn't actually doing anything wrong! Pretty annoying 
though, since spline functions are pretty powerful.

> Anyway, really cool images.  Is there an alien clown fish that can live in
> this anemone?

Aha... that gives me an idea of how to use the alien eyeball I started 
working on :)  Thanks for the feedback!

Pete

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