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The Nogard Dragon has the remarkable ability that it is able to pass through mirrors. It is not easy to catch the dragon in the act of doing so. The reason is that the animal likes to spend most of its time "on the other side". It is not known what it does there because we cannot get there. Of course, we can send one of our mirror images. But, like our shadows, our reflections are not very bright and have sofar not been of any use in attempts to track this mysterious beast.

Many people wonder what our strangely coloured friend does on these rare occasions when it is on our side. It makes me blush just to think about it. Everyone should discover this on their own. All you need is a reasonably sized mirror, and patience. Lots of patience. Place the mirror on a flat surface, sit very still and stare at it for a long, long time.


Technical details
This image has been generated using the POVRay raytracer. I created the original scene more than ten years ago, and recently decided to created a higher resolution image. In doing so, I fixed a few bugs (I noticed that the dragon's feet were not actually touching the floor and that it also crushed the glasses beneath one of its feet) and made a few other cosmetic changes (most notably, all shadows now have soft borders).

Note: No post-processing has taken place to make the illustion work. This is the 3D scene as it is rendered by the raytracer. "How can this be?" you may wonder. That's a good question indeed.

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Submitted on
January 18, 2009
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800×600
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:iconintro71292:
~Intro71292 Jan 12, 2011  Hobbyist Traditional Artist
So well done.:clap:
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:iconintro71292:
~Intro71292 Jan 13, 2011  Hobbyist Traditional Artist
You are welcome. :D
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:iconinspiredcreativity:
*inspiredcreativity Nov 28, 2010  Professional Digital Artist
In the world of perspective, reflections in spheres have to be the most difficult to get right, and then to reflect that in a mirror is even more challenging. This is beautifully done.
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:iconeriban:
Thanks. In a way you get the nice spherical reflections for free when using ray-tracing as a technique to generate the images. However, that's also the difficulty. The reflection physics are as they are and reflect in a wide range of directions. This creates a few challenges to achieve the illusion, as you might imagine.
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:iconinspiredcreativity:
*inspiredcreativity Nov 30, 2010  Professional Digital Artist
You are most welcome. Life would be dull with its challenges, but sometimes life is overly generous with challenges, lol.
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:iconstareon:
~Stareon Nov 24, 2010  Hobbyist General Artist
This is quite a mesmerizing image. The reflections on the mirror and glass sphere really draw me in.
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:iconeriban:
Thanks, and I know what you mean. The image still draws me in every once in a while as well.
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:iconultimatecreature5757:
Wow! Imagine the reward you'd receive for the dragon's capture! Oh my!...........You would have enough money to hire Chuck Norris to be your personal body guard for the rest of your life!
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:iconeriban:
I spot two flaws in your perfect plan though. First of all, how to capture the dragon? Secondly, the guy is seventy... But then again, he is Chuck Norris of course. Okay, make that only one flaw. ;-)
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