Western Omelette

This Is Not - quite - A Checkered Plane, although the topic lends itself to it; but while the way of apprenticeship is through imitation and reproduction of the conventional, the Way To Mastership is through invention and innovation.

According to popular tradition, Christopher Columbus, having been told that discovering the Americas was no great accomplishment, challenged his critics to make an egg stand on its tip; after they gave up, he did it himself by tapping the egg on the table so as to flatten its tip.

The moral is that true Mastership is not in perfecting on doing difficult things, but in doing things differently, or even finding new things to do - leaving well-trodden paths to embark on ways nobody has ever walked (or sailed) before.

Looking at it from that perspective, any event that disturbs your daily breakfast rotine may be an opportunity to try and start your day differently, walking the Way To Mastership.

Both the egg and the nutshell-ship are meshes modeled from scratch using Wings 3D, and Photoshop for the sail texture. The mug is a mesh object I found on the 'net somewhere.

The spilled coffee and egg white are blob objects comprised of a total of 130.368 elements (mostly flattened spheres), placed to form a map of North America. Placement was done using POV-ray's Scene Description Language, laying out a grid of potential "spillet" locations, and comparing their co-ordinates against a projected world map (using pattern functions and projection warps to do a gnomical projection, based at 22°30'N, 80°W, i.e. somewhere at Cuba - not the first island Columbus set foot on during his first expedition, but undoubtedly the biggest one). Both coffee and egg white use absorbing media instead of filtered surface color for a more realistic look.

The almost-but-not-quite-checkered plane is - I have to confess - in fact a checkered plane after all, but projected in the same manner as the "coffee map" to form a matching grid of longitudes & latitudes at 10° intervals. Two area lights complete the scene.

Radiosity data was gathered in a 320x180 pixel pre-render, taking 3h 29m to compute; the final render, with soft shadows, focal blur and all took another 4h 14m.

The main difficulty with this shot - apart from having the idea in the first place - was an abundance of radiosity artifacts on the coffee-covered wood, probably due to the small vertical dimensions of the puddle, media interaction, and maybe amplified by back reflecting rays; so settings were - again - not easy to find. Using MegaPOV's additional settings seems to have helped a bit.

Interestingly and topically, the coffee puddle idea was in fact the result of what I'd call a lucky failure: Originally, I tried to combine both the map and the associated latitude & longitude grid in a single "woodwork", but struggled to find a fitting combination of four wood textures that wouldn't drown either the map or the grid. It was then that I realized I needed to do something different...

Credits go to DrNo for a long and inspiring e-mail conversation, and for feedback on preliminary shots of the scene.