If we stop loving, do we stop living? Floating, or falling, in love?

If we stop loving, do we stop living?

Is the heart in the image floating, unattainable, hallucinatory; or falling, mortal and dire?

Reflexively, I want to reach out and catch it before it hits the surface of the salt pan.

The heart itself is vivid, but intangible, and its vibrant, ruptured, fluid form echoes the strongest feelings of loss and transience. We each endure like the heart in the image, improbably rising above adversity, through sheer spirit of will.

We reach out to others to touch their hearts, and there is little else.

Warning: Pretentious, retrospective analysis follows

The heart, symbol of spirit and life force. The desert, symbol of death. Salt pan, cycular regeneration, with it's periodic flooding. Something that has long been outwardly dead, but which returns to life, however meagre, with nature's inevitability. A dried inland sea: all life arose from the oceans, we float in salty amniotic fluid before birth, and carry salt water in our veins.

The persistence of the heart in this environment is a metaphore for our never-failing spirit and determination, that we are indeed sustained by our own good will and altruism. Who can live without others? And what purpose could such a life have?

Perhaps the image is the hallucination of a parched traveller, showing our own need for assistance from outside. Or may it be the work of some extra-terrestrial being? or magic? - the wonder of life!

Before viewing

Note that the images supplied are in the gamma=1.0 colourspace. Please adjust your viewing environment if necessary, or save the files and gamma correct them to suit your own monitor using image-editing software.

The heart-blob object should appear quite red, NOT mostly black, and the landscape SHOULD appear slightly washed out, simulating atmospheric haze.

Notes regarding how it was made

The heart-shaped 'blob' object is created using a macro to fill a heart-shaped mathematical 'isosurface' function with around 700 small 'blob' objects, who's fields interact to produce an effect something like fluid floating or falling.

The fluid/vitreous effect of the heart uses PoVRay's 'photons' to simulate refraction and reflection. Simpler methods were inadequate for the desired effect.

The landscape uses three layers of spheres, the hills being a spherical 'isosurface' function deformed and scaled to fit.

Some atmospheric haze is provided using PoVRay's 'media' in the interior of a spherical shell surrounding the surface of the landscape.

To generate the heart shaped blob object, I have adapted a macro which I wrote for another purpose: filling a space with tons of bubbles and without intersecting.

Here most of that effort may not be needed, since blobs automatically take care of what happens at intersection. But since I have that procedure already, it's more efficient just to adapt it, than to rewrite it.

I borrowed the idea from FillCylinder by Friedemann Schmidt webmaster@friedemann-schmidt.de, although my version is completely rewritten.

An 'include' file is generated listing the positions of blobs. This means subsequent renders can be done a bit faster, and you can hand-tune the locations of individual bloblets.

Textures are defined in the main file, rather than the generated include file. This means I only need to keep track of a single source file, the include file can be reliably generated from scratch as needed.

Persistence of Vision(tm) Ray Tracer Version 3.6.1 (g++ 3.3.4 @
 i686-pc-linux-gnu)

blood_sky_heart_source.zip (7 kb)

Interesting concept, perhaps too simple technically. With a bigger heart, it could make a nice poster or book cover.