This Is Not A Checkered Plane

Image title:
'This is a knot, checkered, on a plane'

Image description:
See image title! Ho ho ho.

Image creation:
I wanted to keep this one simple. I was after a simple geometric idea that
I could have some fun with. So, I dug out the code I wrote last year for
assembling knots from layers of bricks, and rigged it to make a grid of
square slabs instead (turned out to be much simpler). Then it was just a
matter of playing with the environment; I eventually settled for a dark,
reflective floor plane with an elongated granite normal. I also used
radiosity and a ground fog to help with the final look.
Rendered in <30 mins using MegaPOV 1.21 on a 1.8GHz 512MB MacBook.

[
For the technically interested:
The knot algorithm first calculates the length of the knot by stepping
round the path in small increments and summing the distance between
consecutive points. Then objects can be placed equidistantly along the path
by repeating the process and placing objects whenever the summed distance
since the last object equals the required spacing. Objects are lined up
with the direction of the knot path using the vector between successive
objects. When building each layer of bricks, the gap between each layer at
different points around the radius is evaluated and the brick placed at
that point scaled accordingly. In this way, bricks are taller on the
outside of curves and shorter on the inside and gaps are avoided.

Because the integration of the path length and spacing out the component
positions can take quite a long time to parse, the knot is built in two
passes. Firstly, the path length is calculated and number of component
objects specified. Then the object positions are calculated and written to
a data file. The second pass then reads all these values from the data file
to assemble the knot, saving up to 90% of the parse time, or even more if
the component spacing is small.
]