SquareTomato - POV-Ray
 
  2010/09/05    
     
 

My Works

 
The_Rubik_Cube.pov
   
 
rubik_cube.jpg

.....it's not Rubik's, it's mine!

Solved-3a.png
  
With this year's come back of the Rubik Cube and other such tortuous products, I thought it was about time I put pen to paper and generated my own cube - It's a superellipsoid frenzy!  Did you know that a Rubik's Cube can have 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different positions, about 43 quintillion, I've done a couple!
 

> Includes

Only standard POV-Ray includes were used in creating the image. MegaPOV was required for the HDRI lighting aspect.

> Textures

Rather than the technique of using image/material maps for the stickers, an approach taken by other artists, the stickers are objects in their own right (see below). The textures, therefore, were just a series of nice, highly reflective, plastic type textures that I've used in some of my other images. Seven colours were used in total - red, orange, blue, green, blue, yellow, white and black - all with the same finish. The table is just a simple metallic texture.

> Objects

The cube itself was constructed from 27 superellipsoids with small identical numbers for Value_E and Value_N - giving a cube with rounded corners. The stickers were also made using superellipsoids (slightly smaller), the difference between it and two boxes. Positioning of the stickers was a little tricky but worked out fine after a little experimentation.

> Scene

HDRI lighting was used to illuminate the scene. In this instance, i used the FJ BH Halle image available on the 3Dweave.com website. I think the HDRI image works well overall, although maybe a little too blue.

> Post Processing

A small adjustment was made to the brightness and contrast of the image in Photoshop. No depth of field was used.
 

I rendered several other images using different cube patterns:

- Six Spot

- Plummer's Cross

- Pons Asinorum

- Six T's

Six-Spot-3a.png
Plummers-Cross-3a.png
Pons-Asinorum-3a.png
Six-Ts-3a.png