CPSC 3710 Computer Graphics Project Ray Tracing Software

Created By Jiajia Zhang


River Fragments, Sun Life Plaza Sculpture


Final Image

Reference Image

Reference Image Info

I found this picture while after doing a Google search. This image is called River Fragments, Sun Life Plaza Sculpture. It's located in Calgary, Alberta. You see where I acquired the picture from here.

Project Development

The final Image is created by the software POVRay. Orignally I want to use 3DMax to do this project, but I didn't find a source to download and installed, so I decided to use POVRay, which is free to download and easy to install. The start was a little bit slow because I spent a lot of time on reading the ducments. I spent weeks on the project, which includes red POV tutorial document, created some example pictures, searched examples on the internet,  and created the POVRay image for this orignal photo of the sculpture.

This sculpture consists of several polyhedrons, cylinders and a pyramid. The bottom part consists of a cube and a pyramid which is easy to make. The top part is a little complex, I used four cuboid for the border and six cuboid in the center to divide the center space into sixteen grids. In each grid I use a long thin cylinder drill through a short thick cylinder to consistes a part. There are 16 parts in totoal, so I used one declared veriable as a part, and I spent a lot of time on how to rotate and translate these parts into each grid because these parts are in different positions and the long cylinder are pointing to different directions. Then I add sky and clouds, and included a grasstex.inc file from an grass example which I searched from the internet.

I change the texture of the bottom part of the sculpture because I want it looks like crystal. The top part of the sculpture is metal, and the floor and the border of the area is marble.