Plants, by Gilles Tran

Here is a scene written by Gilles Tran from 2004 who has published the Povray code under a creative commons Licence. We tweaked a bit the original picture, removed some fog, changed the camera slightly, added a bit more sun light and deterministically placed the monarch butterflies. Gilles had used various additional tools to create the plants and the butterfly, but eventually, everything is done in Povray. All the ingredients are either textures or text files describing geometric objects. In this scene there are 33173 objects. In the 3600x2700 resolution (9'720'000 pixels), this takes 2-3 hours. The ray tracer has to bounce off a lot of light. There is a magical trick which makes ray tracing possible. Instead of trowing off the photos at the sun and collect at the camera, the ray tracer emits the photons through the camera and checks the brightness like that. This is much more effective as most photos coming from the light source never reach the camera lense. Click for larger 3600x2700 pixel picture.