High!

Perhaps some folks here remember my "Oriental Tileworks" posting of
April 7, 2001... now I'm back with the concept,
inspired by a Muslim friend who is quite a gifted calligrapher and
painter. He made several square calligraphic images in
Arabic kufi style, composed of numerous small squares, mostly in only
two colors... and recently, I got the idea to use theses
pictures as a basis for PoV renderings.

I then wrote a small C++ programm to read in TGA bitmaps containing the
calligraphic patterns of Isma'il's works (by the
way, shouldn't there be a way to do this directly from PoV-Ray?) and
convert them into a two-dimensional PoV-Ray array.
Then I also wrote a macro to generate subtle color variations for each
original pixel. In the renderings, the pixels are
represented by small superellipsoids with a ceramic-like finish.

To each original square TGA bitmap with the side length n twelve cube
edges with a separately specified basic color are
added, so the total number of superellipsoids is
n^2 * 6 + 4 * (n + 2) + 8 * n...

...in these scenes, using a 174 by 174 bitmap, I ended up with 183,752
superellipsoids, the parsing time was well above one
hour on an AMD K6-II/400 with 256 megs of RAM.

The calligraphic writing on this cube, by the way, consists of my
friend's Islamic name, which is Muhammad Isma'il.

See you in Khyberspace!

Yadgar

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