Gordon Luu
Description for project artifact.


The picture you see is the Sagitarius, but it was made abstract, so the readers have to 
guess what it is about.  I used texture mapping to load the scene to the front.  There are 
3 light sources: one directional light source from angle (-1, 0, -1) and two light points 
from above and below.  The light sources not only illuminate the scene but also remove the 
shadows caused by the lenses.

I created 4 ellipsoids inside the larger spherical lenses.  Since all of them are 
transparent, you can see the cool effect of double refractions.  But this was not an easy 
task as you think.  It involves rotation of the 4 inner ellipsoids, resizing the lenses, 
and the adjustment of the indices of refraction.  If you are not careful, instead of 
creating double refractions, you will add a lot of black shadows caused by reflected lights 
can not pass through the lenses.

The thing behind the lenses is a Sagitarius (a half horse and half human creature) running 
on the water.  The combinations of 5 lenses stretch and illusionize the scene, adding a 
"watery" effect to it.  So this is a water-within-water scene.