The title "monolight" is from the name of a track on the 1977 Tangerine Dream live recording "Encore." My hope is that this image represents progress towards my goal of producing renderings that stand on their own merit as art. The primary purpose of my previous renderings was to gain control over certain computer graphics rendering techniques; while they are perhaps visually arresting, my previous renderings are programming exercises more than they are art.
Some technical details: This rendering was produced by a C program of approximately 1000 lines of code. The landscape was derived from data from the National Elevation Dataset representing terrain near 46 degrees N and 122 degrees W (this is near Mount St. Helens in southwestern Washington state). This is approximately the same landscape and view as the previous rendering, but elevation values have been decreased (by a constant factor), and the landscape was rendered with a single dull color (to approximate scotopic lighting conditions). The reflective sphere of the previous rendering was moved to the far background, and only has ambient reflectivity (to produce a featureless, flat appearance); the critical change from the previous rendering is to place the location of the light to the location of the sphere. This produced the effect of the moonlight illuminating the landscape. Diffuse reflectivity was tweaked to make highlights somewhat smaller (to increase the sense of depth in the scene). Nothing in this rendering has specular reflectivity.
(Here is the previous rendering referred to above.)
