> 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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