Results of the POVRay Fractal Raytracing Contest

A special thanks to the panel judges: Cliff Pickover and Gayla Chandler.

What is this contest about anyway?

Click on any of the images to see a higher resolution representation.

Title: Resurrection of Golden Section
Author: Thies Heidecke
[POVRay Source]

Panel judge
This is superb. It reminds me of something alien, something hivelike or corallike. The texture and lighting is very good, making me want to reach out and touch the object as I run my fingers lingeringly over its surface. A perfect model for the next Alien movie or hardcore science-fiction book cover.

Title: Oops, I dropped it on the floor!
Author: Juha Nieminen
[POVRay Source]

Panel judge
I enjoyed this immensely for its humor, realism, and simplicity of design. The lighting and floor pattern are excellent. The title is great. This reminds me of something that might have fallen from my soldering gun, but in reality, I suspect that it is a 3-D cross section of a quaternion fractal.

Title: Golden Section
Author: Georg Mogk
[POVRay Source]

Top Ten

Top Ten

Panel judge
This entry is excellent for its beauty, symmetry, and colors. I could easily imagine people hanging this in the most elegant homes. The image conjures associations with soap bubbles and stained glass windows. The harmony of the rendition is compelling, reminding me of something religious, a 21st-century God.

Top Ten

Top Ten

Top Ten

Top Ten

Top Ten

Panel judge
The regularity of the overall structure mixed with the irregularity of the sizes of the spheres that make it up creates an enigmatic effect. My favorite section is on the bottom-right where the spheres are highly irregular and interior definition is compromised.

Panel judge
Initially, this entry made me think of the porcupine puffer fish, because its bones are in the shape of convex hulls, or skeletons, of irregular tetrahedra, which two years ago caused me think, for the first time, about the skeletal structure of regular tetrahedra. The Old Fractal takes this form, or a similar form, and iterates it. These fractal formations and their surroundings conjure notions of skeletal tetrahedron ships at sea, meeting in time warps. The rust on the "old" fractal is so nice. The dodecahedra was an apt choice for the center connection since the tetrahedron sits perfectly inside the dodecahedron, sharing four of its vertices. The 'modern', steel version of the fractal is consistent in this respect, since the tetrahedron also inscribes into a sphere. Overall, I find this entry to be poignant and mesmerizing.

Panel judge
I like it that all the spheres run through the same axis. It gives a sense of order. Coloration and shadow draw attention to an imaginary pipeline of expanding spheres that give a sense of vibrational qualities, of reverberations that could potentially generate expansion, perhaps outward, inward, horizontally, whatever growth would be allowed given the constraint of the shared axis, causing the spheres to be confined yet dynamic.

Maintainers choice

Maintainers choice