Hello everybody.

Every time you install Windows NT, the default background colour is always
rgb <0, 0.5, 0.5>. I think this is the most boring and annoying colour that
is mathematically possible! I hate it! I wish I could reverse-engineer the
whole operating system and just annyalate every single occurance of this
retchid colour!

But anyway, since that's not possible, I have another idea. I thought I
could create a nice backdrop image and beam it to all our computers over the
network, then remotely edit the registry to set it to use it. (When no one
is logged in at least. I found out how to change the settings used when *no
one* is logged on - while I was on a course actually! Usefull... now I can
make it so that the NumLock key doesn't keep switching off every single
frigging time you log out!)

Anyway, that psuedo-random ramble leads us back to the subject of POV-Ray.
If I'm going to put a nice backdrop on all the computers, first I need to
create such a backdrop! And what's the best drawing tool in the universe?
(Oh ok, maybe that's overstating it ;-) I thought if I'm going to have a
standard backdrop it should probably have the company logo in it. Other than
that, I was pretty clueless.

After many different ideas (rippling water, various hi-tech texturing
options, maybe a cloud of smoke...) I eventually came up with bubbles -
because even an inferior being like myself get (just about) get bubbles to
work!

The first image shows what I came up with. Each "bubble" is a transparent
sphere with fresnel variable reflection and an IOR of 1/1.33 (the idea being
to make it look like it's a bubble of AIR surrounded by WATER - is my logic
correct?) The image looked great... but when I tried to use it as a
backdrop, I discovered that a clump of bubbles down the left-side somewhat
obscured all the icons. To remedy this, I turned the highlights on the
bubbles down, and then I flipped the bubble positions along the X-axis. (The
positions are random; I suppose I could have tried using a different seed
value instead...) The image attached is what I got AFTER having done these
things.

Still a bit obscure, so I tried making the lighting yellow instead of white.
(The blue glow is an ambient=1 texture on a distant plane.) Since the logo
is orange (and has metallic reflection) it makes no difference there. With
the highlights now being yellow, the icons show up better IMHO... Opinions?

By the way... does anyone know of a cheap algorithm for "randomly" placing
the spheres a little more evenly? I mean, I want to have slight gaps and
slight clumps, but I'd like it to be a little more even. (And perhaps have
the bubbles avoid the left side slightly.) Most particularly, I don't want
the bubbles to intersect each other! (This scene already takes way too long
to render without using a merge!)

Just for the purpose of avoiding intersections, I could simply store an
array of bubble coordinates and radii, and which each new sphere against
that... anyone know of a cheaper way?

Thanks.
Andrew.

PS. You have no IDEA how closely that logo matches the real thing!!! I'm
really proud that I got it so right... Even the colour is right! (The "S"
was the hardest part... the top and bottom don't line up; if you line them
up it looks wrong. So you have to slightly un-align them to get the correct
optical illusion!)

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